Taylor’s Builder’s Edition 614ce with V-Class Bracing
Combining premium aesthetics and ergonomics with tone-enhancing details, Builder’s Edition instruments represent the pinnacle of Taylor craftsmanship. The Builder’s Edition 614ce Grand Auditorium acoustic-electric guitar features revolutionary V-Class bracing, which boosts volume evenly across the tonal spectrum, increases sustain, and improves the natural intonation of the instrument by creating a more synergistic response from the soundboard. This fosters a more harmonious relationship between the notes you play, helping chords ring out in cohesive splendor.
This guitar boasts spectacular tonewoods: figured bigleaf maple for its sides and gorgeously bookmatched back, torrefied Sitka spruce for the top, and West African ebony for the fingerboard. This combination results in a sound that’s ultra-responsive to your touch, enhancing maple’s natural transparent brightness with warmth, richness, and dimension. Premium Builder’s Edition features include a beveled ebony armrest for enhanced picking and strumming comfort, along with 21:1 Gotoh 510 tuners for precise tuning. While you delight in its beautiful tone, your eyes will savor the Builder’s Edition 614ce’s tasteful appointments, which include ebony binding and elegant mother-of-pearl scepter fingerboard/headstock inlays.
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V-Class bracing: a sonic revelation
Bracing is the internal framework of an acoustic guitar that helps shape its sound. Although X-bracing has been standard in acoustic guitars for over a century, it creates an innate conflict between two key elements of a guitar’s sound: volume and sustain. The guitar’s top (its soundboard) contributes to both. The flexibility of the top generates volume (projection), while its stiffness generates sustain. And with X-braced guitar tops, here’s where the tradeoff comes in: when something is made stiffer, its flexibility is reduced (and vice versa).
V-Class bracing changes all that. With Taylor’s V-Class bracing, an acoustic guitar top can be both stiff and flexible — for more volume and sustain. V-Class bracing provides stiffness parallel to the strings for more rigidity and, hence, sustain. Flexibility on either side generates the air movement necessary for robust projection. It’s the best of both worlds. This groundbreaking innovation also improves intonation — not only producing notes that are louder and with longer sustain, but more in tune with each other. Guitarists at Sweetwater are gobsmacked. But don’t take our word for it — pick up the superb Taylor Builder’s Edition 614ce and experience it for yourself!
Grand Auditorium body style delivers exceptional presence
Taylor’s beloved Grand Auditorium body style, featured on the 614ce, employs the width and depth of a dreadnought. Still, its waist is narrower, which gives Grand Auditorium–bodied acoustic guitars a sleeker look with more treble zing. The 614ce’s Grand Auditorium body style also helps sharpen the definition of each note, balancing out nicely with the excellent projection of its Sitka spruce top. Taylor uses their Silent Satin finish on the top, back, and sides to reduce contact noise for a cleaner overall sound.
An inspired tonewood combination
Although maple has traditionally been associated with brightness in acoustic guitars, Taylor takes a different approach with the tonewood — voicing its maple guitars to coax the hidden complexity, warmth, and sustain. This expands maple’s tonal range from a one-dimensional sound to a highly musical voice that’s eminently more versatile and highly reflective of your playing technique. As a top tonewood, Sitka spruce offers a combination of strength and elasticity that delivers a broad dynamic range with crisp articulation that’s ideal for a wide range of playing styles. Taylor’s proprietary roasting process minimizes the Sitka’s natural damping effect to help deliver a more “played-in” tone.
Cutting-edge Taylor Expression System 2 electronics
If you play plugged in, then you’re going to love the Taylor Expression System 2 (ES2) electronics built into your 614ce. The key to this fantastic system is the 3-section proprietary pickup located behind the saddle. Because of where it’s positioned and how it’s integrated into the 614ce’s saddle, the ES2 pickup provides you with remarkably clear and accurate sound. In addition to a master volume control, two tone controls let you tweak your highs and lows to get the sound you need, and a discreet phase switch offers vital onboard feedback suppression.
Taylor Builder’s Edition 614ce Acoustic-electric Guitar Features:
- Sitka spruce top and figured bigleaf maple back and sides
- V-Class bracing with Relief Rout
- Compound cutaway
- West African ebony fingerboard, binding, truss rod cover, and bridge pins
- Beveled ebony armrest
- Paua rosette with koa and ebony purfling
- Tropical mahogany neck with satin finish
- Scepter mother-of-pearl fingerboard inlay
- West African ebony overlay and Scepter inlay in headstock
- Black graphite nut and Micarta saddle
- 25.5" scale length
- Gotoh 510 tuning machines with 21:1 gear ratio
- Taylor Expression System 2 electronics
- Silent Satin top, back, and sides finish
