Taylor 500 Series Guitars

Announcement posted by Music Now 22 May 2015

Read some more about our review of the Taylor 500 series guitar. Music Now stock the largest range of Taylor guitars online and in store.

Today we are looking at the Taylor 500 series guitar. The 500 series is my favorite which may or may not matter to you. But the reason why I love it is because the back and sides are mahogany and I am a huge fan of mahogany. Now this particular 500 series guitar has a spruce top but you often see them with a cedar top. So a cedar top on a mahogany back and sides creates a wood combination that has a bit little less top-end clarity but has a ton of bloom and blossom and warm mid-range, right? What you get from a 500 series with the mahogany back and sides, particularly with a cedar top is you get a guitar that sounds about twenty year old the day that you unbox it and I love that kind of old broken in sound of guitars and you will really get that from a 500 series. What you get from this particular guitar with a spruce top on a mahogany back and sides is a lot of that (music) warm natural blossoming mid-range from mahogany but you also get a little bit more top-end clarity from the spruce. Now spruce because the fibers is long and the wood is kind of a dense wood and it has high volume ceiling, which means if you dig in it will get louder with you.

A cedar top is different where it is a much softer wood, right? On a cedar top if you really dig in it tends to have a little bit of a volume ceiling, right? So if you are going to play in an unmiked or unamplified environment, a cedar top and a mahogany back and sides may not be as loud as you want it to be. If you are going to plug in or if you are going to play around the house, to me there is no better wood combination, just because I love that broken in sound, right? On a 500 series you are also going to get a faux tortoise binding. So you get kind of tortoise shell binding around the guitar, around the neck you are going to get an all gloss finish; so gloss top and gloss back and side, which again these are things that we reserve for our higher end guitars. Once you get the 500 series guitar now you are entering the glossy series, right? 500 and up is glossy. The 500 series comes in a bunch of different shapes so this particular one is a Taylor 516CE. Now 16 means it is a grand symphony body shape; it has a larger lower bout, kind of moved forward, the waste right here is moved forward a little bit, so it has a big bold strum sound to it. But you would also get a 500 series in a dreadnought which would be a 510, a grand auditorium which would be a 514 or a grand concert which would be a 512. This one is a 516CE, now what the CE means is that it has a cut away in electronics that’s what those two letters stand for.

A cutaway on a Taylor guitar gives it more of a progressive; it’s a more modern looking acoustic guitar but also allows for upper front access if you are going to play solos up high. The electronics, it features anything 300 and above, features our expression system. And the expression system is a Taylor proprietary on board electronics which is an under neck pickup and a body center that is mounted to the underside of the soundboard. Now what that is meant to do is to duplicate every thing we love about the 500 series once its plug in. I love the bloom and blossom of a cedar or spruce top on top of a mahogany back and sides. I love that sound, just sitting in a room (Guitar playing). I just love how warm and blossoming it is, right? But when I plug in I want to hear that same warmth, right? And the expression system delivers that for me, right? That’s the 500 series. So total shell binding, spruce or cedar top on a mahogany back and sides, that’s the 500 series. It comes in a handful of different body shapes.

If you have any questions about the 500 series or any other Taylor for that matter, contact your Taylor guitars specialist at Music Now online guitar store