Taylor Guitars 322ce 12-Fret

A Magical Mahogany Monster

For players seeking warmth, punchiness, and clarity in a small-bodied guitar, the Taylor 322ce 12-Fret is an excellent choice. Its small body gives it exceptional nuanced articulation, while its premium tonewood gives it a beautifully full, round voice. Let's take a deep dive and see why the 322ce 12-Fret has captured the hearts and minds of the Wildwood staff!

Grand Concert Greatness

Taylor's Grand Concert body shape offers a host of strengths to both fingerstyle players and strummers. Guitars with this shape produce punchy midrange response, well-defined low-end, and plenty of that classic Taylor sparkle and chime. Their articulation is incredible, and their woody attack captures every detail and nuance of your right-hand dynamics. When you dig into them, more and more overtones pop out of the top as the sound becomes more piano-like and full, like a box full of lush resonance. This is because the Grand Concert's smaller body has less headroom, which makes it easier to get the top moving and get some natural-sounding compression.

The 'Hog and the Tasmanian Devil

The sonic engineers at Taylor altered a classic tonewood formula ever so slightly to give the 322ce 12-Fret a fresh, exciting voice. All-mahogany guitars have been around for at least a century, and for good reason. Mahogany's exceptional warmth, midrange punching power, and natural musical compression have the power to captivate players looking for earthy-sounding acoustic tone. The 322ce has a mahogany top, and it certainly exhibits all of these characteristics in spades.

A Twelve-Fret Terror

A guitar with a 24 7/8"-scale 12-fret neck always has slinkier handfeel than its 14-fret cousins. There's less tension on the strings, which reduces the player's left-hand effort and makes bending much easier. But, a 12-fret neck doesn't just affect feel. To make it work, the luthier must position the bridge in the sweet spot where the top is most flexible. This makes the top vibrate in a different way, and it gives the guitar exceptional punching power, projection, and woody warmth.

A V-Classic

We can't talk about balanced sound without talking about Taylor's new V-Class bracing. It's an elegant solution to a problem that has plagued luthiers for decades. For years, acoustic guitar builders had to compromise between volume and sustain. Flexibility equals volume, and stiffness equals sustain. Obviously, a piece of wood cannot be rigid and flexible at the same time, so builders had to go for one or the other.

Andy Powers wanted to have his cake and eat it, too. After much tinkering, V-Class bracing was his elegant solution to the problem that has plagued luthiers for centuries. As the name implies, V-Class bracing features two long pieces of wood that make a "V" shape together. The bracing is quite thin and flexible near the rear bout, but it becomes thicker as you get closer to the soundhole.

So, you get volume from the flexible parts of the bracing, and sustain from the rigid parts! Many areas of the guitar neck that typically sound weak (ninth fret on the G string, for instance) have just as much presence, resonance, and sustain as the low E. As a result, the 322ce sounds supremely balanced and sculpted. When you hear one played live in the room, you'd swear a mix engineer had already done a bunch of post-production work on it. And, it gives the guitar piano-like note separation and crystalline clarity even when you play fancy jazz chords!

Intonation Station

V-Class bracing also does wonders for the guitar's intonation. Are you ready to have your mind blown? When I visited the Taylor headquarters in El Cajon, Andy Powers explained that an acoustic guitar's intonation is not necessarily just the sum of the typical adjustments like saddle height, nut slots, and neck angle (though they do play a part). The way that the actual guitar itself vibrates also has a lot to do with how in tune it sounds.

Andy told me to picture it like this: when you take close-up slow-motion footage of a guitar's top with a high-speed camera as someone plays it, you can see the top move vividly. On a traditional X-braced guitar, the top vibrates in a disorderly, disjointed manner. This can cause a guitar with perfect saddle height and neck angle to sound out of tune when you play a big open chord.

By contrast, guitars with V-Class bracing vibrate in a much more orderly manner. The graduated braces compel the energy from the player's attack to move from the thin outer part of the bracing to the thicker inner part in an efficient manner. If you were to take a high-speed shot of a V-Class top, you would see it rock back and forth evenly in a pleasing pattern. Because of that V-Class magic, the 322ce 12-Fret sounds so in tune that it's scary.

If you seek a warm, robust Grand Concert with exceptional articulation and clarity, look no further than the 322ce 12-Fret!