A modern-vintage guitar with a Western Red cedar top, tropical mahogany back and sides, and Taylor Expression System electronics.
The Taylor 2012 12-FRETce Mahogany/Cedar Acoustic-Electric Guitar is a Grand Concert that truly speaks for itself. As a result of joining the neck to the body at the 12th fret rather than the 14th and moving the bridge farther back on the soundboard, the guitar's tone sounds wonderfully aged right out of the case. The "modern vintage" voice blends warmth and depth on the low end with sparkling clarity and articulation, and yields surprising overall volume for a smaller body style. Two tonewood pairings are available: rosewood/spruce and mahogany/cedar.
Grand Concert (GC)
Body Width: 15" / Body Depth: 4-3/8" / Body Length: 19-1/2"
A smaller bodied guitar ideally suited for fingerstyle.
The small-body Grand Concert debuted in 1984 to meet the needs of a new wave of adventurous acoustic fingerstyle players. In contrast to the traditionally darker, boomier voices of bigger body styles like dreadnoughts and jumbos, the GC’s compact size and tapered waist kept the overtones in check. It was also more comfortable to play while sitting down, and the guitar’s slightly wider neck gave players more room for complex fingerings. The GC’s smaller sonic footprint also fit cleanly in a mix with other instruments when tracking in the studio and with a band on stage, making it a useful tool for professional session and side players. The current generation of GC models continues to accommodate fingerstylists with finger-friendly traits like a shorter 24-7/8-inch scale length, which makes fretting easier and adds a slightly slinkier feel on the strings due to the lighter string tension. If you feel more comfortable with a small body or favor controlled overtones, a Grand Concert is a great option.
Tropical Mahogany
Origin: Central and South America
Mahogany is a good wood to anchor a discussion of tones, as a lot of other wood tones can be described in relation to it. Its essential sonic profile is well represented in the midrange frequencies. Acoustic guitars in general tend to live in the midrange portion of the sound spectrum, but mahogany in particular displays a lot of midrange character. That thick, present midrange sound is sometimes described in guitar circles as meaty, organic or even “chewy” — wherever a player digs in on the fretboard, they’re tapping into the core of the harmonic content of what a guitar produces. Those great midrange frequencies produce overtones that stack up and produce bloom, giving the sound extra girth. When one hears the resulting harmonics, the “chewy” tone serves up a big mouthful of midrange. As a popular tonewood for many decades, mahogany has been used on scads of old school acoustic recordings, and that sonic heritage carries across various strains of roots music, from blues to folk to slack key.
Expression System®
Natural Sound Made Simple
People love the clear, full acoustic tone of their Taylors. Why should it be any different when they plug in? That’s why Taylor spent several years developing their own onboard acoustic pickup and preamp. Taylor’s ground-breaking Expression System® (ES) was designed to naturally amplify the warm acoustic sound of your guitar.
The ES is an all-magnetic acoustic guitar pickup system that works like a microphone to produce a pure signal and a warm, natural acoustic sound. When you plug in, you'll hear the sound of your guitar, not the sound of the pickup. No complicated controls. No tone simulators. Just a clean amplified acoustic guitar sound supported by three simple controls — volume, bass and treble.
Breakthrough Technology
Years of research brought a simple realization: Nothing sounds as true and musical as a microphone. With that as a starting point, Taylor’s David Hosler led the team responsible for the Expression System's breakthrough technology. Utilizing a unique Dynamic Body Sensor® mounted to the soundboard, a Dynamic String Sensor® embedded beneath the fretboard, and a discrete preamp, the advanced ES technology is unlike any other guitar pickup system.
Integrated Design
The ES was designed in-house, alongside our acoustic guitars, which allowed Taylor to build the ES seamlessly into the design of the guitar, for an integrated pickup system unlike any other. From the design and location of the body and string sensors to the voicing of the preamp, the ES is fully optimized for the Taylor sound. The elegant design, including the non-intrusive control knobs, also preserves the aesthetic of a Taylor guitar.
