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I own a gs mini e koa and it sounds great. The best guitar in the world is always the one you prefer. No use comparing brands because no guitars are exactly the same ...

And craftily implying all solid wood when only the top is solid, ala Zager. You can also tell a solid back wood in that the grain pattern will match inside and out.

Excellent video!!! Thank you!!

Great video and you’ve coaxed a really workable sound out of the ES2. The pickup elements are actually mounted behind the saddle which is why you can adjust the pressure of the three individual sensors.

He didn't really cover a whole lot, still got to figure out how mine works. I have no sound!

All standard brands like Martin use cdc machines and use a standardisation of construction for a particular type of guitar. They are mass produced and nobody assesses the top wood and adjusts the parameters accordingly like flex, bracing, 'tuning' etc. Unless they are custom shop. They do assess the tops for a certain minimum standard but that's it. The higher brands usually do use proper laminates but i wouldnt bet my house on it, especially the middle layer.

"Tone is subjective". Really? What a shocker. People like myself who are not Taylor fans point to the obvious. They are both too bright and lack a string low/ mid character that you get with Martins and especially Gibsons. For them and me thise are the issues. For Taylor fans that is a positive. Sparkly and not muddy. To each his own. It is not criticism but personal preference..

What a bunch of bunk. This is a typical ptovacative youtube header to catch your interest and sow doubt. Decide for yourself what guitar sounds best.

The es systems are trash. I love my taylor 800 series but it sounds like trash.

This video is great, appreciate all the work. Even with no issues, this is great to know to fine tune a specific sound from the ES2

Brilliant explanation! Spot on. Tried loads of strings over time. The light strings imo lost all bass and the guitar jangled n died. They go out of tune all the time. Tried 13s down to 10s. The GS mini sounds best for me with standard 13/56. But if you want a certain sound then go for it n change em. All my changes were D’addagio and a set of 12/53 Elixir which didn’t last and sounded a bit tinny compared to D’agg. they rounded off quick and went dull. I guess when they built and tested it thats why they come with finger killers 13’s😂😂. One thing to note the lights are good for finger picking but strumming horrible for me no bass. Great video. It does buzz with 10s once settled i noticed this.

There are too many people that don’t know how to set them up properly I have and use 3 one has a fisherman and the other 2 have there own . Firstly use a TRS to XLR cable then less is more on the EQ set up there is a very good set up video on here try it and you will be happy with your sound x

I refer to my experience as: went to buy a Martin, came home with a Taylor. At the time, I had picked up guitar after a 50 year hiatus. And my dream guitar back in the early 70s had been a Martin D-28. ($450 at my local store in Los Angeles which catered to the pros in the heady days of folk-rock). After lockdown, I entered a music store, one of my first in person choices after those long isolated months. I played a Martin HD-28, a Gibson J-45, and three Taylors. All the Taylors were easier to fret, had great easy rolling tuners, and best of all the notes of a jazz chord all rang out and didn’t get muddled. As a piano player, this was a key element. I want to hear the fundamentals and the harmonics because … well, it’s lush and gorgeous. So, I’d say tone and feel drove the Taylor purchase of a model with maple back and sides, the 614ce Builder’s Edition. It plays beautifully, acoustic and ES2. It may be my favorite jazz guitar. But my try-out was limited to a few models. And since, I found a old 1930s sounding Martin mahogany top and sides model, the 000-15SM, that I also purchased and love playing. They scratch different itches and are both beloved.

How do you take it out of 16 levels mode??? I'm stuck trying to chop and it's not letting me.

Just bought a 214ce spruce/rosewood, very dull on mids and highs. Gonna send it back.

Why would you buy one.

which is better between umc404hd and scarlett 2i2 3rd gen ?

I almost wiped a hole in my screen trying to get that piece of trash off...the damn wall. Not good for my OCD. Dang it man. Oh, I am a beginner and considering a GS mini with pickup. Yea,?, Nay?... any others without much though? Thanks for the share. I enjoyed it. 👴

The ES2 pickup sounds more acoustic to me. I happened to have a JJB prestige 330 installed in my Yamaha dreadnaught. For it to sound usable, it needs an active DI of 1M ohm and a fair bit of EQing.

I don't have any dislike of Taylor per se. I have tried a number of them and none really grabbed me. I have played 2 of the 12 string models I liked, but not enough better than what I own, a 1977 Takamine F400 and a 2014 D12-28, to make it worth dropping $4K. I also find Taylors heavy for size. My Martin dreads are a LOT lighter than my mentors Taylor 800 series dreads. Resale/Trade value is also relatively low vs Martin or Gibson. But all my instruments are on wall hooks, no closet queens. I take care of them but play the hell out of them. They are of NO VALUE if not used as instruments. My 2021 OMC is already showing fret wear. Play yer damn guitar.....play what ya brung....

Thanks for the video and info on the ES2! What two tunes are you playing for testing?

Yeah it is a matter of personal preference. I have the Taylor 114e. I do like the es2 on my guitar. I think simple thing is make sure volume is up all the way but then every thing else makes a huge difference. Also I used the use Elixir Nanoweb strings but they were too bright so I love the Polyweb 11s. Huge difference.

There are doubletop classical guitars. A laminated guitar is much stronger in most circumstances. Laminates make much better instrument for playing Slide style. Try it. Always FIND OUT for YOURSELF. Most people know shit overall about all guitar building. This guy is too young to be sure, and you can hear it. If it's not on the web, he won't know. Get hold of books written by luthiers, and read those.

I couldn’t get along with the medium 13s and charged them out for 12s Martin Flexible Core Silk and Phosphor Tommy Emmanuel Signatures. I’ve got some arthritis issues and found them a bit easier without sacrificing much tone. I’d even consider the 11s in the Martin’s if I was having problems.

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Goats are mainly gay. These are just facts- sorry. It’s just what I’ve observed. We tried de-gaying the goats with satisfaction melodies and the second de-harmonisation, however some goats remained gay. After experimenting, we ate most of the non-gay goats in curries and creative processes . Order from chaos- in our stomachs

The modern Andrew doesn’t laugh about it. specific SURF guitar pop songs are not what extended chords are for. And what are big ant like……..🎉😂😮

I use extra lights sometimes, but the elixir hybrid set is a wonderful option. 😊13’s have so much less harmonic complexity so I avoid them always.

Both the send to the device and get from device is grayed out. When I click on device setup, nothing shows up. I’ve tried multiple to get this to my applications folder and I have dragged and dropped it into my folder and still it won’t work.

With guitar players, electric and acoustic, there's a lot of emphasis on making sure the guitar has a proper setup for the gauge strings on the instrument. That is VERY important. Especially going from lights to heavy or the reverse. You might need nut slots adjusted on an acoustic, saddle shaved on a traditional acoustic or neck reset on a Taylor... What's not mentioned often enough is how every steel string acoustic guitar is designed and built for optimal tone to occur with a specific level of string tension....The guitar top needs a certain amount of string tension (weight) to properly vibrate the top. For the GS Mini, medium gauge strings give you that correct tension. Go lighter and you subtract about 25 lbs of tension, heavier you add about 25 lbs of tension, too little the top doesn't move because there's isn't enough force... Too much tension and the top gets restricted because the weight produced isn't allowing it to move properly...... Mediums are the correct strings to get optimal tone from a GS Mini. You can set it up for light or heavy gauge and make it very playable, but the one won't be optimal.

My brother-in-law has a GS-Mini and another OM $2500 Taylor (not sure the model#?) with a spruce-top and solid mahogany back and sides. The GS-Mini was heavy to me and sounds terrible with very little sustain. The expensive Taylor sounded nice but wasn't very warm, more on the brash side. I watch Alamo guitars and have listened to Cooper Greenberg play some gorgeous, beautiful sounding Taylors! I love my Martin 000-15M and seems like magic to me. The sustain is out of this world, and my brother steals it to play every time I visit with them! I thinks Martins baby Martin is as bad and heavy as the GS-Mini. I played an $800 Alverez Parlor guitar a couple months ago that sounded just like the martin 00-28 which amazed everyone including myself. I think Taylor and Martin make wonderful guitars and sucky guitars. At the Martin Factory I played 11 of their guitars last summer, and found the nicest most amazing guitar in the Player's Room was the road-warn style of the 000-16 Streetmaster with the VTS spruce top for $1,900. I played 5 guitars over $5000 and the Streetmaster sounded way better, and for the price was unmatched! I don't think I'll ever sell my 000-15M, but I would like to add the 000-16 Streetmaster when I have a few extra bucks. I would also like to pick up an Alverez.

Regarding the possibility of Taylor's neck joint shifting focus to high and mid-range frequencies, it is very possible, I would say probable given there is a distinct absence of booming low-end across the board with their models. Many players don't want booming low-end anyway. But I say this because those boutique builders like Collings who also use a bolt-on neck joint use a modified mortise & tenon joint, which brings the neck into the body in a way Bob Taylor's neck joint design does not. Colling's came after and I believe is a superior bolt-on design, I think if you look at how well Colling's are regarded that's pretty easy to infer as well.... To another point you bring up, yes, Taylor does make decisions based on what will yield the highest margins for Taylor. I'll provide for you a few great examples. 1.) The Expression 2 system. It's a very much get-the-job-done kind of pickup technology, but objectively LR Baggs and FIshman, companies who specialize in pickup technology have gotten the industry much closer to re-producing the natural sound of the acoustic guitar through the pickup. If Taylor prioritized building the best professional instrument possible over profits, they would likely go with one of these third-party options instead of taking the cost-cutting path to do pickups in-house. 2.) Another great example is V-Class bracing. V-Class bracing, like any bracing pattern has trade-offs. any bracing pattern will fortify some frequency ranges and extenuate others. V-Class does an excellent job at note separation clarity and consistent volume up the neck. V-Class does some odd things with note decay open chord strumming on V-Class instruments, regardless of body shape just leaves much to be desired. Boutique builder's like Collings who offered Ladder bracing on some Waterloo models give the customer the choice to select Ladder or X-braced. Taylor no longer offers X-bracing even on custom shop models. They consider it too expensive to accommodate both on the same model. 3.) Urban Ash and other non-traditional back and side wood choices is easy to spin as a conservation effort and of course there's truth in that, but there's also huge cost savings to Taylor for making this choice. The same goes for their forestry efforts, they own land and have tree farms, but they are growing so they can harvest for their own use someday and to sell to other builders. Taylor owns one of the largest Ebony mills in the world and from that mill they do produce Ebony that gets sold to many other builders, giving them a cut of profits off other builders instruments. There's nothing illegal about any of this, my problem with them is their public relations and marketing never brings up the benefits to Taylor this actions have, it's always positioned as good will to earth.... Meanwhile, the huge cost savings to Taylor are not passed on to consumers, the prices of their instruments have increased as their margins have. Taylor's niche is "innovation", but if you ask collectors of instruments, I would say record producers, most anyone in the industry familiar with acoustic guitars, they will talk about C.F. Martin and Gibson acoustic models from the 1940s as if they were a Stratovarius violin. That is when the steel string acoustic peeked. All "innovation" we've seen from Ovation guitars, Takamine and for the past 30 years Taylor is in a way a bag of gimmicks. If you look at professional players who choose a Taylor as their main instrument, these are not renowned acoustic players. Leo Kottke is the exception, but Spoon Philips has said when asked about why he picked Taylor he said the only reason is the bolt-on neck, he has adjusted regularly on tour. So he's after the utility maybe not the tone. Then you have players like Jason Mraz and Zack Brown, both of these guys are playing signature model nylon string Taylor's far far away from the companies Standard series lineup. There's a long, long list of players who did choose exclusively Taylor who have switched to boutique builds or gone back to a Martin or Gibson. Taylor guitars are really good instruments for both beginners and for mostly electric players looking to have an well built acoustic they can play for a song or two. Great for gigging musicians who want a sturdy built, durable acoustic that they never have to worry about an expensive neck reset stealing a month's pay to resolve. For their 50th anniversary sadly they have not a single iconic sought after vintage model from the five decades past with any kind of demand for to reissue. That should really tell you something. Looking at sold listings on Reverb.com of Taylor 600 and even 800 series from the 1990s, I see guitars selling from $800-$1200 . Compare Martin D28, D18 or Gibson J-45's from that era to prices today, You can not lead on innovation and expect older models to hold value. It's like expecting an outdated iPhone to old value. Two additional stories I'll share. 1.) Just last week I was having a conversation with a Certified Taylor Guitar tech, a gentleman who's been building guitars by hand for three decades and does repair work on the side. he told me he spoke with Taylor about the recent decision to start using D'Addario XS strings and leaving Elixir behind, he told me "the rep told me 'we always knew Elixir just didn't sound that great, but they were great for making our guitars shine on the showroom floor against the competition, with D'Addario XS we get the best of both'" 2.) Read Bob Taylor's autobiography and it paints a picture of a man who wants to be remembered as a great, cunning businessman and inventor and a man who could care less about being remembered a great guitar builder. I do respect Bob the businessman and I do like a few models. Plugged in I just don't hear much difference between a 114ce and a 814ce. With any guitar, if the instrument inspires you and makes you want to keep picking it up, then it's the right guitar for you and Taylor guitars are what I see being played most by gigging musicians at local wine bars and restaurants as well as in churches. Players out there trying to get by with the best guitar they can buy. I think they truly build the working man's guitar right now.

Thanks for making a reasonable video about laminate guitars. I work in a guitar shop and many customers won't even look at a guitar with laminate wood. Usually it's because they've been seduced by the belief that laminates are low class. These are the same people who will ask me whether fossilized walrus bridge pins will sound better than bone. Or whether Brazilian Rosewood sounds better than Indian Rosewood. They're caught up in the myths rather than the reality of guitar materials and construction. Your advice at the end is basically the same advice I give people in the shop. PLAY the guitar to see if it feels good in your hand. LISTEN to how it sounds when you play it. If it plays good and sounds good and it's well constructed, it's a good guitar for you. I'd love to sell you a D-18 (which is one of my personal favorites) but you might find a laminate guitar that you like just as much for a lot less money. And that's wonderful.

I own martin, taylor, lowden, marc maingard guitars, they all have their own personalities and unique sounds and I like them all very much, but I also have some dislikes for the bright sound of Tyalor.

Simps gonna simp hard for a brand, regardless of the brand. Easy as that.

I have to disagree with you on the ES2 pickup. Yes, it's better than the undersaddle pickup we had in the 1990s and better than the first ES system. But it's not a patch on the best pickups of the last ten years. You might say that that's a matter of taste, and it is. But what's not a matter of taste is that it's almost impossible to replace the system. You hear better pickups, you try to install one, and you're mostly left with three unwanted holes in the bridge and another three in the side beside the neck. You've paid a small fortune for your guitar and are stuck forever with a sub-par pickup. My advice (too late for myself) would be to only buy a Taylor with no pickup. And even then, only if you really like the guitar's acoustic sound - I wouldn't say they're too toppy, rather that they're not always very warm, which can be an advantage for recording. But even if you like the sound, there's always a risk in getting a pickup installed yourself. It might invalidate your lifetime warranty. It might leave you with an unbalanced, difficult-to-rectify sound. And maybe you'll just be disappointed in the sound, despite the days of Internet research you no doubt did. The best thing about a Taylor is the neck joint. Not just for neck resets, but for keeping a great action throughout the life of the guitar. It means you no longer have to keep shaving bits off the bottom of the saddle when the neck moves a little. Once you've done that a few times, you find yourself having to file down the top frets. Over the years, this can be a never-ending nightmare on some guitars. You end up paying out large amounts of money to luthiers in exchange for a guitar with a saddle so low you've lost half of the tone of the guitar. Not on a Taylor. Pity it's not really "plug & play".

I have a seagull and a Simon and patrick both solid cedar top with laminated cherry/wild cherry. Proper quality 3 layers of solid wild cherry. No junk middle layer like other manufacturers tend to do. Durable and sounds great.

I’ve owned a couple of Taylor‘s and it’s hard to get a deep bold sound. They’re always very bright and in actuality the best Sound I ever had was from the GTE urban ash which is a smaller body guitar.

I recently purchased a 414ce and have struggled to get a decent sound out of it. I am having serious buyers remorse. I am thinking about dumping it and trying to recover most of my money and pulling my Epiphone DR500mce refitted with a K and K pure mini back out of the closet which sounds a thousand times better. Taylor may be built more solidly but their pickups sound horrible unless buried deep with a mix.... A 3,000 guitar should not have issues like this.... I have tried 3 Taylors of the last 10 years and have not been happy with any of their plugged in sound. More expensive is not always better.... Sometimes the Brand Name tax exceeds the actual value. Taylor is way over hyped in my actual experience. Coming from someone who has been playing over 40 years...

I have a taylor 412...and guild d120. Different as night and day...love both. Guild makes awesome affordable guitars

No soul

This is super helpful thank you! I didn’t realize that I could tweak the electronics. I have an 814ce with the ES2. You got it sounding great. I honestly liked the dry sound you ended up with (before the modeling, etc…). I’d probably stick with that and just add in a little nice reverb. Thx!

I think a lot of the “too bright” woes are a simple fix…strings. Taylor ships their guitars with Elixer coated things that are super bright, and stay that way for a long time. Swap on a set of phosphor D’addarios and play it for a few hours-it changed my perceptions. The second thing, unfortunately, is time. I bought a 414CE in 2010. I bought it over similarly priced Martin and Breedlove offerings because of how it played and, at the time, the ES1 sounded superior to the Fishmann electronics (to me). The Martin sounded better acoustically, but 90% of my use was plugged in. Fast forward about 5 years, and after a bit of a hiatus, I could not believe how much the unplugged tone of that guitar blossomed. It sounds phenomenal, and maybe not as noticeably as that first few years, sounds even better today 9 more years on.

Bought a Taylor 224CE DLX. Loved the look, the feel of it, the acoustic sound of it. Took it home and went to my next 2 gigs. Absolutly hated the sound of the ES2. Even recorded with it and hated it. Took it back and bought a Martin GPC16 with a typical pup in it.

Over 25 years of playing live I've been lucky to use and own a lot of brands of guitar. My take on guitars is this, use the one that sits best in the mix (even if its a solo thing). I guess it depends on your target sound. Each guitar has its own character and most can be used to great effect. Right now I use Gibson, Martin, Eastman, Cole Clarke and Taylor acoustic guitars. They all have a place in my music. Enjoy them all, try them all, have a great journey 😁

I have wonder how many of the people in this section dogging on the ES2 think their Martin with a junk Piezo is the pinnacle of plugged in tone. At the end of the day, very few systems compete with the Anthem for tonal quality and diversity, including most of the junk they put into Martins these days or any ES system that's ever been on the market.

I like Taylor just don’t love them. I cut my teeth on a Taylor and progressed in my eyes to Martin which pleased my ear better. I find Taylor cost to feel unreasonable, the mandatory pickup system rather than giving option to choose what works for them, and while I love Andy Powers as a guitar maker and personality, they just seem so unbelievably hooked on marketing mumbo jumbo. Taylor is super playable though, work great in a mix, and the used market is really really good cause there’s so many out there they can’t be resold anywhere close to what they cost new. Which is good and bad.

These days, unless you're well-heeled enough to pay for the hand-built masterpieces of individual, shop-of-one luthiers--Olson, Monteleone, Beneteau-what you are really getting from the top-tier factory guitars (Gibson, Martin, Taylor, even Larrivée) is CONSISTENCY. CNC machines and other so-called advancements standardize everything, which means you're going to get far fewer lemons, but you're also going to get far fewer unlikely hidden gems. My go-to acoustic from 1996 until it got semi-retired about 2012 was a spruce/rosewood Yamaha built in a Korean factory in the 1980s. It sounded as good as any Gibson or Martin acoustic I ever picked up that wasn't a pre-WWII museum piece worth thousands more than I could ever afford. Part of the reason I hung onto that guitar, and still have it, is because the reasonable sale price for that model is around $400. There is NO WAY a guitar built at that level is supposed to sound that good. It's like winning the lottery, and that's part of what I like about the old ways of building, even if they do produce more "best for around the campfire" guitars-and maybe one or two "best for IN the campfire" guitars. Case study #2, I needed a 12-string acoustic while living on the West Coast, and again I was on a budget, so I picked up the Epiphone DR-212 you can hear on "Desolation Sound" for around $200. Again, I found a diamond in the rough. It also punched far above its weight. But given the low price of it, and the cost of moving it back to Ontario, I reasonably thought it would be more efficient to sell it locally around the same price, then buy the same model locally 3,000 miles to the east. It's an incredibly common guitar, and it wasn't hard to find another. The difference? Nobody ever wins the lottery twice with the same numbers. The new DR-212 sounded like mud, like you took a cigar-box guitar and stuffed it full of socks. Taking the time to set it up properly helped a little, but not much. I sold it soon after because it made me sad to have one that looked so much like the "Desolation Sound" twelve, and sounded so inferior. (At the $200 price point, it probably was more typical of the model.) I'd give it a solid C grade against the A- of the other one. That's a big difference for a $200 guitar. What Taylor has done, more or less, is standardized Grade A- quality with very little wiggle. Maybe at the 214 level you'd get a B+; maybe at the 914 level you might find an A. But more or less they're all within one letter-grade of each other because machine-generated consistency is now the secret sauce of producing fewer duds. Face it: you can't find a solid-wood Taylor that's absolute garbage, not anywhere. But you also no longer "get lucky" the way you did with the old-style handcrafted factory guitars, like the Gibsons made in Kalamazoo before they left the state. Here in Canada, Larrivée is another case study in point. He was (and is) a master luthier of my parents' generation, actually a little bit older: he's now 80 years old. When he started making guitars in 1967, he made them in his own shop in Toronto (though he still has a lovely trace of his Québecois accent). From 1977 on, he spent a few years in Victoria, BC with a staff of five or six people, producing up to one guitar a day between them. His wife Wendy did the exquisite inlay work on the guitars he made himself. They rarely leave Canada, and they're priceless treasures. As the brand took off, he moved to a larger factory in Vancouver and took on more and more workers. In the course of my lifetime, his name transitioned from being a luthier's signature to being a brand name: a hundred years later, I guess I know how Gibson fans felt when Orville Gibson's own company left him behind and took over manufacture. The Vancouver period saw 45 staff members producing 32 guitars a day. Then, he opened a shop in Oxnard, California, and left his Canadian shop in the hands of his son. In 2013 the Canadian office closed for good. The new Larrivées (which are now produced in a massive California factory, where Jean finally ended up) are still very good guitars, and they've preserved most of his design features. But while the best "manufacturing" may approach the the level of decent "luthering," it'll never reach the peak of all those artisans who were such great artisans that they became a brand.

I’ve had Taylor’s and I’ve had Martins. I’ve never had an issue with the binding coming off of a Taylor……..