Ambushed Part 2 - Taylor Gold Label Series 717e SB
I wasn't supposed to like this guitar.
10/03/2025
It is time for me to wax rhapsodic about vacations. You see, a break from work gives me time to check out the local guitar stores. Time has proven that vacations can be quite hard on my pocketbook because that's when I am most likely to be "ambushed" by a nice guitar. With that in mind and knowing that I am in a retrenchment cycle with guitar gear numbers, it seems remarkable that my lovely wife mysteriously urged me to go to the guitar store during my recent vacation. Strange, but wonderful. So, this was how I came to fall in love with and begin "visiting" a lovely Martin 000-28. On my second visit I took my wife with me, just to stay out of trouble. After a while with the Martin I was abruptly handed another guitar to compare to it by a salesman, and I innocently just tried it.
I was really impressed. Really impressed.
But before we go on to the review, I should also mention that reviews tend to be written early in the author's exposure to the subject item, the honeymoon period. I try to buck that trend, taking time to become familiar with the item first. Nevertheless, it is almost necessary for me to begin such reviews early on because that is when the enthusiasm and energy exist that are required for me to get off top dead center and start writing. If the project is left for a while there's a chance that the review will never get finished. So perhaps we'll start early and then take time to let our enthusiasm wain enough for level-headedness to take over.
Background:
I've been a Taylor owner since 2000. I have found them to be great guitars with their own sound and have found the company to offer excellent customer service. In the last few years, with Andy Powers at the helm, Taylor guitar design has seemed to go a new aesthetic direction, one that diverged from my tastes. The newer visual aesthetics were all wrong to me, from colors to features. They'd also jumbled up the basic line descriptions that linked woods and body shapes to line numbers, making it hard for me to keep up with their changes. That meant I was no longer familiar with their models and no longer a word-of-mouth resource to them. I noticed that folks in my demographic seemed similarly affected - bemused and befuddled.
Right around that time a video of Vince Gill and his vintage guitar collection led me off to investigate and eventually bring some lovely, woody Martin guitars into the fold. I'm glad it did - they are some fine guitars. But I'm not a man who loves Mr. Maggi and hates Mr. Knorr. I like guitars for their sound and feel, regardless of their maker. In fact, I own baseball caps from both Taylor and Martin. It's funny: working with Amy Grant led me to my first Taylor guitar and seeing Vince Gill's collection led me to my first Martin. That marriage has cost me some money. Just kidding. They are great people.
So, here we get to it: The guitar I experienced on this vacation is part of a new series from Taylor, the Gold Label series, launched with great fanfare and marketing at the beginning of this year (2025). Now, given all the recent changes at Taylor I've become quite immune to their marketing. I love their craftsmanship. I LOVE their customer service. But the whole artisanal promotional thing surrounding this series was a bit too much for me, to wit:
But in this case I was simply handed this guitar without any identification and without any hype, while trying out a great 000-28. The salesman made the suggestion, "Try this guitar. It is more of everything you like about the 000-28." So, I did. I played it on its own merits and freely compared it to the Martin that I was "visiting". The 000-28 was smaller, short scale, more intimate, and a better lap guitar, while the sound of the 717e turned out to be very much "more" of everything, indeed. While I auditioned it, my wife's ears perked up and her eyes lit up - she was impressed by the piano-like bass that came from it.
The Guitar
The guitar in question is a Taylor Gold Label Series 717e, a new Grand Pacific (slope-shoulder dreadnought) guitar featuring Indian rosewood sides and back, a neo-topical mahogany neck, a torrefied Sitka spruce top, added depth at the front bout, added width at the lower bout, Fanned V Class Bracing, and a relief route around the underside of the top to give it greater compliance and response. Ther model premiered at the beginning of July, 2025. This example was the first to arrive at the store and arrived at the store the day before I tried it. It was the first one they'd seen. In fact, I think I was both the first person to try it and the only person to have played it by the time I took it home the next day. As I went back and forth between the two guitars, each time I got to the Taylor, my wife's face lit up. She was trying to act neutral and let me make my own decision, but she simply couldn't conceal how much she liked the 717e. Now, she does love bass, a lot, and the guitar does offer that in spades.
As usual, after that first visit I went home and scoured the Internet to study the thing. From a video I discovered that Andy Powers was attempting to create a 1930s to 1940s vibe, a new/old vibe. He was going for the sound and feel of an old, vintage instrument, a comfortable, familiar feel, but he still wanted it to take advantage of his latest technology. The 700 series used to be Taylor's best value. Basically, they offered 800 series woods with less ornamentation at a lower price. Was this a return to that philosophy? Did Andy perhaps sense that he had alienated Taylor's long-term buyers with all the alterations to the numbered-series lines and by all the aesthetic shifts in a more avant-garde direction?
Well anyway, I was convinced. I took in a couple of other guitars and made a trade that worked out really well for me.
The Long Tenon Action Control Neck. Courtesy Taylor Guitars
The guitar features some new-to-me things in a Taylor:
The new "Long Tenon Action Control Joint" allows you to adjust the neck angle with the guitar strung up and at tension.
The Long Tenon joint offers more wood-to-wood, neck-to-body contact than other traditional bolt-neck joints, for greater sustain.
The Fanned V Class bracing with an underside relief route around the perimeter allows a top more responsive to a lighter touch. Andy says that the V class allowed him to easily make changes to the sound for particular models. This guitar combines the V Class bracing with fanned braces below the bridge, like a classical guitar has.
The braces are glued with hot hide glue.
This dreadnought comes fitted with light gauge strings(!).
The frets are pocketed like those of the Martin Standard Line. Is this a first for Taylor?
Fanned V Class Bracing. Courtesy Taylor Guitars
The Sound
The overall sound of this guitar might be designated Taylor's "MWS - More Wood Sound." The mids and top end are more woody sounding, with less zing than you'd expect from a Taylor. The sound is definitely fuller and more open than I've experienced in Taylors before as well. Let me compare it to a couple of icons: The Martin OM-28 and HD-28. The OM-28, long-scale brother of the 000-28 I was auditioning, is known for its smooth midrange and gentle high end. It is a refined-sounding instrument. The HD-28 is known for its full, boomy, responsive bass, slightly pinched midrange, and bright, chirpy high-end. It has a raw, rustic, bold sound. On the Taylor, the bass is full, robust, responsive, and gutsy, much like a good Martin HD-28 dread but maybe with a little more definition and less boom. You still feel the bass resonate through the guitar's back, though. Basically, the 717e sounds much like an HD-28 in the bottom end paired with an OM-28 through the mids. The top-end and has the refinement in sound and gentler feel of the OM-28 but a little bit of the HD-28 brightness. As you lean into it, the treble shines a little more, as well. For fingerstyle, it offers typical Taylor individual-string definition and feels soft on the right hand, yet somehow it manages to yield excellent chord blending when strummed. In the past I have found that those two characters typically lived in different guitars but here they are conjoined. Strummed chords do hold together well, which has been something of a limitation in the Taylors I've played before. When my wife heard me strum across the strings, her eyes lit up. "I like the way it strums," she said, simply. Interesting. It is full and smooth. Now, I suppose I should mention again that my wife likes bass in an acoustic guitar. A lot. She isn't all that fond of the little Martins I've been drawn to of late. I think they are probably too round sounding and too intimate for her. Remember as well: The low-end, volume, and resonance we experienced in spades in these guitars is achieved with light strings in the same way you experience them with a typical dread strung with medium strings. Pinch harmonics ring loudly and true. The guitar offers plenty of sustain and compresses when pushed, and the attack generated by hard fingerstyle can be moderated by it as well.
I'll say it again: I wasn't supposed to like this guitar.
Aesthetics
Like I said, I wasn't overly fond of the visual changes I saw in newer Tayors in the pictures on the 'Net. I just wasn't fond of the overall aesthetic Andy Powers had brought in. It seemed like an attempt at instant Americana or vintage. Cue the much-hackneyed pork pie hat. They talked of a "new/old soul." However, this guitar itself looked very nice and unpretentious in person. It's a funny thing about that: Perhaps Andy has seen how modern he'd made everything else in the various lines and is attempting to retrench a little in the Gold Label and Legacy series for the sake of his long-term customers. As I have usually seen with Taylors, the fit and finish of the guitar is impeccable. I hadn't been fond of the brownish sunbursts in pictures, but paired with their "Firestrip" pickguard, this one, the "Golden Brown Sunburst," comes off well in person. Of course, it doesn't hurt that it has a gloss finish. Sorry, I am old school that way. By Martin's grading system, the back and sides are built with beautiful, straight-grained, rich-looking rosewood. There is a nice, dark chunk of ebony on the fingerboard and the headstock overlay is lightly figured ebony. The close-grain Sitka spruce of the top is not obscured at all by the light sunburst and there is no central line or shading remaining from the torrefaction process at the center. The inlays are quite moderate. It all adds up to a nice looking and feeling guitar.
This is a big dog!!! The upper bout of the standard Grand Pacific is as deep as that of a standard dreadnought and the Gold Label 717e Grand Pacific is even deeper there. It is also wider in the lower bout than a typical dread. When I was sitting on a stool this wasn't evident but on the sofa it does feel quite deep and the lower bout of the body does feel large. It took a while for it to dawn upon me just how big the guitar really is.
The Feel
The guitar came with an action that was a tiny bit high for me. After sighting down the fretboard I had the dealer check and adjust the relief. That brought the action down substantially, but I could tell that something wasn't quite right. That happens often - each player has different tastes and the manufacturers typically don't absolutely optimize their guitars' actions because to do so would cut into their profit margin or shift the price point of an instrument out of its target range. Taylor is pretty good at it, but I've become accustomed to better. Once I bought the instrument, having studied their Web info and watched their videos on the Action Control neck joint adjustment, I ordered the tools from Amazon that Taylor themselves use to adjust the neck joint, a 11.5" flexible 1/4" drive shaft and a handle, for a whopping $20. Using those tools, it was easy to bring the neck angle into spec and look for the best string height compromise I could, but when optimized, the G string buzzed if you leaned into a chord. It clearly wanted a trip to my luthier, Kenny Marshall, for a proper set up and fret dress. Kenny handed me back a substantially improved guitar, smooth, solid, and secure, with no buzzes. It cost a bit, but I've grown to expect the need for a set up and fret dress with guitars of all manufacturers, Taylor, Martin, Gibson, etc. I mean, even Andy Powers has discussed the fact that it is a good thing for guitarists to have the action adjusted to their preferences. More about the setup, HERE.
Now it is as good as gold, indeed.
Even though they call it a standard-carve neck, the shape of neck is somehow different from recent Taylors I've tried as well, perhaps deeper, with some more V to it? Maybe the shoulders are a bit more rounded. I don't exactly know, but as a result, I am more able to easily do some things I have found challenging on earlier Taylor necks.
The Element VST controls. Courtesy Taylor Guitars
The Pickup
In my view, all pickups are compromises, so don't get excited. I think that Taylor has developed a very pragmatic outlook on pickups through rough experience. Bridge plate pickups are far more prone to feedback than any of the under-saddle types. Taylor knows that many of their guitars will go into novice hands and that a hard-to-operate system will be a calamity for novices. Their introduction of the original ES-1 was a sort of rolling disaster, and I don't think they were interested in any more of that. They wanted to introduce the Gold Label Series as guitars with a young/old soul and decided to offer them without their flagship pickup, the ES-2. The ES-2 is okay, it really is, but it is comparatively invasive, with three visible screws run through the front of the bridge, three knobs on the body, and a battery drawer at the end. That simply doesn't look vintage. So, they went with a hybrid upgrade LR Baggs system, the Element VTC, that combines features of the Element and the Session VTC.
Though it is an under-saddle system, the Element VTC exhibits very little, if any, quack. I was impressed enough by the pickup that I started doing some research to find out more about it. Interestingly, I had to look everywhere except LR Baggs' own site because they don't even list the pickup there. We know by now that piezo quack on under-saddle pickups comes from the fact that the piezo element is extremely dynamic, so dynamic in fact that on transients, the pickup puts out a transient that most preamps can't reproduce. Instead, they just saturate and distort, and we hear that as quack. I had long thought, "Why can't someone tame that transient?" It looks like that is exactly what LP Baggs has done with their Element VTC. It is a UST, but they've inserted a compressor early in the signal chain that tames the transients and largely kills the quack. They also claim to mix in some harmonics "for warm, tape-like saturation that sounds like a studio-grade mic." Hehehe. Ad copy.
Could It Really Be That Simple?
So I called 'em up and asked about it. Yup, that is exactly what they've done. Amazing. As someone who records guitar (and other things) for a living, I regard all pickups to be compromises and mainly useful for live work but have come to appreciate the specific strengths of under-saddle pickups systems that aren't shared with any other type, namely good noise rejection and feedback resistance. So, to find a UST that is as quack-free as the Element VST is rather pleasant.
The VTC stands for "Volume , Tone, Compression." They give you most of the Session features: the preamp is designed to compress the low end to reduce quack and feedback and the controller has an active tone control. There are no holes in the bridge or side of the guitar so it is far less invasive than the ES. It also pairs well with Taylor's Circa 74 amplifier. More, HERE. The result is a win-win. This is about as quack-free a UST as I've encountered and is easy to replace, leaving no holes if you want to upgrade. Forum guys have always said they didn't want the barn door or knobs on their pickups. Voile'! You got it.
Conclusions
Taylor's 717e is priced at about $500 less than similar Martins. The guitar is available in sunburst with a choice of cream or firestripe pickguard, in natural with the firestripe pickguard, and in black with the creme pickguard. The sunburst and black finishes come with a $200 upcharge. I am beginning to see left-handed versions online with no upcharge. So, if you are looking for a bigger sound, here's a rather big opportunity.
Specs
Body Shape: Dreadnought
Back & Sides Wood: Indian Rosewood
Top Wood: Sitka Spruce
Top Finish: Gloss
Color: Sunburst
Body Bracing: Fanned V-Class
Neck Wood: Mahogany
Neck Finish: Satin
Neck Shape: Standard Carve
Radius: 15"
Fingerboard Material: Crelicam Ebony
Fingerboard Inlay: Crest
Number of Frets: 20
Scale Length: 25.5"
Nut Width: 1.75"
Nut Material: White Tusq ?
Saddle Material: Micarta
Bridge Material: Honduran Rosewood
Bridge Pins: East Indian Rosewood
Tuning Machines: Taylor Standard Nickel
Electronics: LR Baggs Element VTC
Strings: D'Addario XS Phosphor Bronze Light, .012-.053
Case/Gig Bag: Hardshell Case in a new color: British Cocoa. Interior is dark royal blue.
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