My guitar collection - Acoustics
A beautifully built travel guitar produced by this other innovator in guitar building: Bob Taylor. With a born-on-date of April 24, 2000, this is still an early, American built Taylor Baby, before production moved to Mexico, with diminutive body dimensions of a 12½” width, 15¾” length, and 3⅜” depth. Although the 22¾” scale length and total length of 33¾” are nowhere near a quarter shorter than a typical (scale) length, a guitar like this is still called a ¾ model. According to one source the ‘GB’ means ‘Gig Bag’. This guitar came with the SKB style hardshell case with Taylor logo. The top is Sitka spruce, its sides and back are laminated sapele. It has a mahogany neck connected to the body by 2 Phillips screws through the ebony fingerboard between the 15th and 16th fret. The headstock to neck joint demonstrates one of Taylor’s innovations: the Finger Joint. Although the 301-GB is no longer offered, more info on the equivalent (non-contemporaneous) BT-1 model is available through this archived (2011) link:
Taylor 301-GB Baby
The story behind this guitar
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Like described above, the perfect travel guitar, the one I take on the road to Kalaloch and other places.. Only modification I made was upgrading the bridge pins to black buffalo horn with abalone inlay. The fact that you can no longer get them with a hardshell case was not known to me until much later; even the 1999 version seemed to have come with a gig bag. So I lucked out there I think. I tune this puppy a half step lower to reduce the tension on the neck. This improved the setup and intonation quite drastically. But it makes this small treasure sound amazing: lots of sparkling highs and pronounced bass for balance. And when you hear something like that during a Guitar Center Red Tag sale (or whatever their color du jour is), ...
