Taylor Guitars Take On a Shade of Green

And now—the suburban streets of California?

Taylor Guitars Inc., founded by Bob Taylor in 1974, recently introduced three “Urban Ash” models, made from trees culled by municipal governments in California and Arizona. Instead of being turned into mulch or firewood, Grandma’s curbside shade tree might be transformed into a musical instrument—specifically as one of Taylor’s signature six-string guitars.

This twist on urban forestry has a couple of benefits: It uses a resource that would otherwise be squandered, and it helps musical-instrument makers put more distance between themselves and a global logging industry whose history is tainted with colonial abuse or tree-poaching. While guitars never account for more than a rounding error in the tropical-wood trade, especially compared with goods such as furniture, the instruments are high-profile: They are beautiful, played in most cultures, paraded on stage and screen, and frequently cross international borders while regulators watch for endangered-species violations. Under President Barack Obama, in 2009 and again in 2011, federal agents staged raids on the maker of Gibson guitars over its ebony-procurement practices. 

Making a guitar from a non-traditional wood is one thing, but persuading a player to shell out $3,000 for it is another. Co-founder Bob Taylor, 65, already had bucked traditions set more than a century earlier by pioneers such as C.F. Martin and Orville Gibson; he persuaded buyers to try an adjustable bolt-on neck, rather than a rigid one. 

Taylor also encouraged something that, while it seems like a small change, has real-world implications for conservation in the world's fragile tropical forests: using wood that isn't perfectly black on the fingerboard, the flat slab of wood on a guitar's neck that holds the frets. Taylor says in an interview that he saw the impact first-hand after buying into an ebony operation called Crelicam in the West African nation of Cameroon in 2011. 

Given the preferences for perfectly black ebony in goods such as furniture and instruments, cutters might eliminate 10 trees in search of the perfect one, leaving the logs to waste on the forest floor. Taylor saw opportunity in the discarded wood, for his company to be a better steward. It would require educating consumers about variegated, or striped, woods.

Rather than throw these striped ebony fretboards on lower-price models, which might diminish their perceived value, Taylor placed them on his high-end 800-series line. “We put it on our flagship guitar, basically to let people know that we’re proud of it,” he says.

The so-named Ebony Project in Cameroon, which includes efforts to help local workers benefit economically from their natural resources, resulted in Taylor winning an Award for Corporate Excellence from the U.S. State Department in January 2014. “Bob and Taylor Guitars have fundamentally changed the entire ebony trade,” then-Secretary of State John Kerry said in presenting the annual award, which was created in 1999.

This year, Taylor’s Ebony Project met one of its key goals: planting 15,000 ebony trees in the dense forests that make up much of Cameroon. Those trees will benefit future generations, as they take the better part of a century to mature.

Taylor has three models that use what’s marketed as “Urban Ash” for their bodies and sides: the Builder’s Edition 324ce, released in March with a street price of $2,999; a 326ce that went on sale in July; and a brand-new, small-body shape called GT that debuted in October for $1,400. All are built at Taylor’s El Cajon, Calif., factory using trees harvested by West Coast Arborists Inc., an Anaheim-based contractor that maintains trees for more than 300 municipal governments in California and Arizona. 

John Mahoney, who manages West Coast’s Street Tree Revival program and is the son of the business’s owner, said the urban woods his company collects are used or tested by customers, including furniture company Room & Board and Fender, another famed California-based guitar maker. WCA manages an inventory of about 10 million trees. It plans to plant about 20,000 this year and remove roughly an additional 16,000.

Scott Paul, who leads Taylor’s sustainability initiatives, helped connect WCA and the guitar maker. Bob Taylor and Paul visited Mahoney at West Coast’s log-sorting yard, joined by Andy Powers, Taylor’s chief designer and one of three current co-owners. After hours of searching and cutting samples, Taylor and heir-apparent Powers settled on a tree that mirrors the story of modern California itself: Shamel ash. The species was popularized in the early 20th century by U.S. Agriculture Department citrus expert Archibald Shamel, whose work with shade trees in Riverside provided a model for the boom years of California real estate development.

California’s Shamel ash may be the signature wood on the BE324ce model Taylor introduced in March, but the guitar still has an international pedigree. Taylor says its top—the vibrating part of the guitar perhaps most responsible for making sound—is made of Honduras mahogany that comes from India. The neck also is derived from mahogany, and the fretboard comes from Taylor’s Cameroon mill. 

Taylor expects Urban Ash guitars to account for about 4,000 of the 150,000 guitars his company will build this year at its El Cajon factory, east of San Diego, and at a plant just across the border in Tecate, Mexico. That’s down from about 165,000 last year due to Covid-19 shutdows. The company predicts revenue of about $115 million for 2020.

“We definitely want people to just have a guitar that if we weren’t living in a day where it’s unusual that something was sourced and cut and processed sustainably, that it would go unnoticed,” Taylor says. “We don’t want it to be unusual one day.”