An interesting article from Rolling Stone about how Taylor guitars are seeking out alternative, unglamorous sources for quality woods.
An interesting article from Rolling Stone about how Taylor guitars are seeking out alternative, unglamorous sources for quality woods.
They must be running out of pallets.
I am all for alternative woods but the article was poorly done. For instance they say guitarists are conservative and give Gibson's self tuning guitar debacle as an example. They didn't fail due to guitarists conservatism. They failed because they didn't work very well and added weight to the headstock. Guitarists can be conservative but many fine makers use woods other than spruce for tops, like Alaskan Yellow Cedar for tops and I don't hear about them being a hard sell. Using urban wood is a good idea but they can't be to scared of being able to sell them if they are asking $3K for the guitars made from it.
A long time ago, I made a living in marketing and public relations. (Please pardon me; I was young and stupid.) The referenced article is an attempt to gin up a product press release from Taylor Guitars into a supposed piece of journalism. Epic fail, obviously. But that's also the basis of most "journalism" these days. Back in the day, a press release was a tool with which you would begin a conversation with a knowledgeable editor and potentially develop the relationship into publicity for your client. In current times, the punks put their byline on the press release and publish it verbatim. That's just how it's done.
I have great respect and admiration for Bob Taylor as a luthier, engineer, and businessman. If anybody can make this approach fly, he can.
A couple of weeks ago, a friend sent me an article that consisted of a sequence of press releases on, of all things, weighted teddy bears for adults, under the title, "WTF ever happened to Rolling Stone?" What indeed.
Marketing today is a polite term for what is often something far different. For luthiers: Particle board made from real wood! For an acquaintance of mine in charge of an international rollout couple decades ago : ‘this new opioid is not addictive’. And on and on
Particle board made from select woods bound into a high tech wood product using our proprietary matrix binder and high pressure presses.
What was curious is that I could not find any mention of what species of timber they were planning on using. I have no idea what has been planted as street trees in Southern California, other than perhaps Australian eucalypts and acacias.
http://www.mcdonaldstrings.com
The Mandolin Project on building mandolins
The Mandolin-a history
The Ukulele on building ukuleles
The article says it (easy it to get lost in between the ads, etc.):
“The new material, which Taylor is calling “Urban Ash,” is being sourced from Mexican Shamel Ash trees planted throughout California just after the WWII era. The trees are nearing the end of their life cycle and need to be chopped down anyway — perfect for a guitar maker.”
The problem is not wood.
The problem is Bob Taylor insisting on consuming 130,000 guitars a year worth of wood.
What is Taylor building with Ash? That's typically used for solid body instruments. I read recently that Fender is getting away from Swamp Ash because it is becoming scarce. So this strikes me as Taylor putting a spin on a business decision to try to corner the supply of what's left.
I thought it was a a very strange article/advertisement.
Rolling Stone has become a bigger than life corporate entity, no longer a source for the edgy behind the scenes music magazine it once was.
Things change, not always the way we would like them to. I stopped buying it years ago, not much in it that had any bearing on anything I was interested in. I get one if the cover story looks interesting but, I’m getting older and am starting to shoo kids off my lawn these days!
Timothy F. Lewis
"If brains was lard, that boy couldn't grease a very big skillet" J.D. Clampett
I am not sure what species "Mexican Ash? is. I lived in Southern California in the 90's and don't remember seeing ash trees as sidewalk trees. What I do remember is Jacaranda, which is a species of rosewood. That would be a cool use of urban trees.
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