Taylor has created a new category of acoustic guitar with the 2021 GT Urban Ash Grand Theater. It packs the tone of a full-size instrument into a more compact, inviting form. The result is a guitar that’s incredibly fun to play, with a distinctive sonic personality worthy of any pro player’s toolbox

Body Shape
The enormous popularity of the GS Mini over the last decade informed the design of the Grand Theater. Rather than pursuing a better GS Mini, Taylor master luthier Andy Powers designed a new guitar entirely: different body and neck dimensions, with new bracing, made with solid wood. It preserves the playing comfort of a smaller guitar while also producing a fuller-sounding voice. And its compact form makes it ultra-responsive to a light touch. Between the unique body dimensions, scale length, nut width and bracing, it introduces not just a new body style, but a new guitar category in both feel and sound.

Tonewoods
First introduced on Taylor’s Builder’s Edition 324ce, urban ash is a tonewood Taylor has embraced both for its sustainability and tone. Responsibly sourced from Shamel ash trees in need of removal from municipal areas in Southern California, its tonal properties rival those of high-quality Honduran mahogany, serving up a pleasing midrange warmth. 

Together with C-Class bracing and the compact dimensions of the body and neck, the spruce top is responsive to a light touch yet capable of impressive tonal output, offering players a dynamic and expressive musical palette to explore.

The Grand Theater gives Taylor a platform to introduce another fretboard wood, eucalyptus, that offers great potential alongside ebony. Its comparable weight and density are ideal for holding frets, and Taylor is able to source it responsibly either from plantation-grown trees or through its Urban Forestry initiative with West Coast Arborists, Inc., in Southern California. 

Internal Bracing
The 2021 GT Urban Ash Grand Theater acoustic guitar sports a unique Taylor bracing system called C-Class bracing. The “C” is for "cantilevered". This bracing architecture borrows some of the functional benefits of Taylor’s V-Class bracing, including more stability, yielding impressive volume, sustain and intonation that sonically helps the guitar punch above its weight and sing with clarity and balance across the tonal spectrum.