Three Fresh Taylor Guitars Have Landed at Musicmaker
From a ridiculously lovable GS Mini to a magnificent Next Generation 324ce, three new arrivals are giving us some very good reasons to stay in the acoustic room this weekend.
There's a particular kind of excitement that comes with opening a fresh delivery of acoustic guitars. You know the drill. Cases and boxes arrive, somebody produces a Stanley knife, the kettle gets forgotten, and within minutes the entire shop has developed a sudden and very serious interest in the acoustic department.
This week, the culprit is Taylor Guitars.
Three beauties have just landed at Musicmaker, and they couldn't be more different. We've got the wonderfully compact GS Mini Mahogany, the sophisticated and articulate 212ce Grand Concert, and the rather spectacular Next Generation 324ce in Shaded Edgeburst.
Three instruments, three distinct personalities, and a lovely journey through some of the ideas that make Taylor such an important name in modern acoustic guitar building.
So, in the interests of musical temptation, let's work our way up from the most affordable.
Fair warning: this could get expensive.
Taylor GS Mini Mahogany: Small Guitar, Big Personality — €579
There's something almost comically charming about the Taylor GS Mini Mahogany. It's compact, beautifully proportioned and easy to pick up without giving the matter much thought.
Then you play it.
And suddenly the little guitar that looked like a convenient travel companion is producing a remarkably confident acoustic voice.
The secret begins with its solid tropical mahogany top. Unlike spruce, which often delivers a bright, expansive response with plenty of overtone activity, mahogany tends towards a more focused fundamental, a warm midrange and a slightly rounded attack. The result can be wonderfully direct: chords have a woody character, individual notes feel substantial, and fingerpicked passages retain a lovely sense of intimacy.
Taylor pairs that solid top with layered sapele back and sides, keeping the instrument durable and accessible while allowing the soundboard to do the heavy lifting. It's a clever combination for a guitar designed to be played frequently, carried around and generally enjoyed without ceremony.
The GS Mini body is derived from Taylor's Grand Symphony design, scaled down into something exceptionally comfortable. But Taylor hasn't simply shrunk everything and hoped for the best. The guitar's 23.5-inch scale length is a big part of the appeal.
Here's a little guitar nerdery for you: with the same string gauge and tuning, a shorter scale requires less string tension than a longer one. That gives the GS Mini a slightly more relaxed feel under the fingers, making chord stretches and bends particularly inviting. Add Taylor's famously comfortable neck design and you've got a guitar that's dangerously easy to play for much longer than intended.
There's no onboard pickup on this particular GS Mini Mahogany, and that's absolutely fine. This one is all about the pure acoustic experience: pick it up, tune it, play it, grin like an idiot.
It also comes with a padded Taylor gig bag, because there's a very good chance it's going to follow you everywhere.
At €579, the GS Mini Mahogany is an absolute charmer. It's ideal for songwriters, home players, travellers and anyone who appreciates an acoustic guitar that never feels like hard work.
And here's our favourite thing about it: plenty of experienced guitarists who own considerably more expensive instruments still adore their GS Minis.
Once you've played one, that makes perfect sense.
Taylor 212ce: Torrified Spruce, Walnut and a Touch of Class — €1,039
Now we're getting into some particularly interesting acoustic territory.
The Taylor 212ce Grand Concert is a beautifully balanced electro-acoustic that combines traditional tonewood ideas with a little modern science. Its elegant proportions, Venetian cutaway and understated finish make it look wonderfully sophisticated, but there's serious engineering happening beneath that spruce soundboard.
And the word to pay attention to is torrified.
The 212ce features a solid torrified spruce top, paired with layered walnut back and sides. Torrefaction is a controlled heat-treatment process carried out in a low-oxygen environment. It changes certain physical and chemical properties of the timber, including reducing moisture-attracting compounds.
Guitar makers use the process to influence the stiffness, weight and responsiveness of soundboards, with the aim of producing some of the tonal characteristics associated with naturally aged wood. Does that mean somebody has invented a time machine for acoustic guitars?
Not quite.
But it does mean a carefully treated spruce top can behave differently from an untreated one, and that's a genuinely fascinating piece of modern lutherie.
The 212ce's Grand Concert body shape is another important ingredient. Smaller than Taylor's Grand Auditorium, the Grand Concert offers a comfortable playing position and a controlled, articulate response that can be especially rewarding for fingerstyle guitarists. There's a lovely sense of organisation to this sort of guitar. Bass notes remain defined, treble melodies have room to breathe, and complex chords can retain their individual voices rather than collapsing into a great enthusiastic cloud of acoustic noise.
The 24⅞-inch scale length also contributes to a slightly more relaxed playing feel than Taylor's longer-scale models, while the 1¹¹⁄₁₆-inch nut width provides a comfortable string spacing for players who prefer a relatively compact neck.
And then there's the walnut.
The layered walnut back and sides bring attractive natural figuring and a dependable structural design. Paired with the spruce top, the combination aims for a clear, balanced voice with enough warmth to keep things musical.
For live performance, Taylor includes its Expression System 2 (ES2) electronics. Unlike conventional undersaddle piezo systems, ES2 uses sensors positioned behind the saddle to capture string-driven movement in a different way. It's an ingenious approach to translating the acoustic character of the instrument into an amplified signal.
Plug the 212ce into a good acoustic amplifier or PA, and you've got a guitar designed to move comfortably between the living room, the recording studio and the stage.
A West African ebony fingerboard, neo-tropical mahogany neck, chrome tuners and structured gig bag complete a very appealing package.
At €1,039, the 212ce is the thoughtful player's Taylor.
It's refined without being precious, comfortable without feeling small, and packed with the kind of practical design choices that reveal themselves over months and years of playing. A lovely guitar for the player who's starting to get very particular about their acoustic sound.
And quite right too.
Taylor Next Generation 324ce: The Dark Horse — €2,499
Oh, would you LOOK at this thing.
The Taylor Next Generation 324ce in Shaded Edgeburst is the sort of guitar that makes you stop halfway through a conversation and wander across the shop.
The finish is glorious: deep, earthy colour fading towards darker edges, the natural grain of the mahogany top visible beneath the gloss, and just enough visual drama to announce that something rather special has arrived.
But this is no exercise in fancy woodworking alone.
The Next Generation 324ce represents Taylor's continuing obsession with improving the acoustic guitar in ways that actually matter to musicians. At its heart is a solid tropical mahogany top. Mahogany soundboards have a character all their own, often favouring a strong fundamental, warm midrange and a naturally controlled response.
For a singer-songwriter, that can be a particularly attractive combination. A focused midrange can sit beautifully beneath a vocal, while the rounded attack helps prevent aggressive strumming from becoming overly sharp.
The body is Taylor's enormously successful Grand Auditorium shape, a design that sits between the compact intimacy of a smaller acoustic and the sheer air-moving authority of a dreadnought. It's a wonderfully versatile platform. There's enough body volume to support confident strumming, but the waist and overall proportions remain comfortable for seated playing and more delicate fingerstyle work.
And then we reach the really interesting stuff.
Taylor's Next Generation design introduces scalloped V-Class bracing, an evolution of the company's distinctive internal bracing architecture.
Traditional X-bracing has dominated steel-string acoustic construction for generations. Taylor's V-Class approach changes the way the top is supported, aiming to improve the relationship between stiffness along the strings and flexibility across the body.
Why does that matter?
Because a guitar soundboard has a difficult job. It needs to be strong enough to withstand string tension while remaining free enough to vibrate efficiently. Change the bracing and you change the way that energy travels through the instrument.
The scalloped Next Generation design refines that balance further, with particular attention to low-frequency response, sustain and tonal consistency.
It's exactly the sort of development that gets acoustic guitar enthusiasts leaning forward in their chairs.
Then there's Taylor's Action Control Neck, another rather clever piece of engineering.
Acoustic guitar action is affected by neck geometry, string tension, seasonal humidity changes and the player's preferences. Traditionally, meaningful changes to neck angle can be a specialist job.
Taylor's new long-tenon neck architecture is designed to make string-height adjustments more straightforward for a qualified technician, allowing the instrument to be set up to suit the player with less invasive work. That's not a particularly glamorous selling point until you've owned a beautiful acoustic for a few years.
Then it becomes a very glamorous selling point indeed.
The Next Generation 324ce also introduces Taylor's Claria electronics, designed to give performers useful control over their amplified sound. Acoustic pickups have always faced the challenge of turning the complex movement of a wooden instrument into a reliable stage signal, and Taylor's latest system continues its long-running work in that area.
Add the Venetian cutaway, premium appointments, ebony fingerboard and deluxe hardshell case, and you've got a seriously accomplished modern acoustic-electric.
And that finish. Have we mentioned the finish?
At €2,499, the Next Generation 324ce is the statement piece of this week's arrivals.
It's for the guitarist who appreciates the traditional beauty of a fine acoustic but also wants the benefits of thoughtful, contemporary design.
Warmth, articulation, playability and a very healthy amount of guitar-shop window appeal.
We are, quite frankly, smitten.
Three Taylors, Three Very Different Reasons to Fall in Love
Here's what makes this little arrival particularly enjoyable.
These guitars aren't simply three versions of the same idea at different prices.
The GS Mini Mahogany is about immediacy. Compact dimensions, a lovely woody voice and that irresistible pick-it-up-and-play quality. It's the guitar that makes an ordinary Tuesday evening disappear.
The 212ce is about refinement and balance. Its torrified spruce top, Grand Concert body and ES2 electronics make it an exceptionally appealing choice for players who want detail, comfort and versatility.
And the Next Generation 324ce is about exploring what a premium modern acoustic can achieve. Solid-wood construction, advanced bracing, a highly adjustable neck system and a rich mahogany voice, all wrapped in one of the most handsome finishes we've seen in a while.
The prices tell you where they sit in the range.
But the interesting thing is how differently they make you want to play.
And that's something no specification sheet can tell you.
From the Musicmaker Workshop: Come and Meet the New Arrivals
We've been selling guitars in Dublin since the early 1980s, and there's still something wonderfully exciting about fresh instruments arriving through the door.
Especially when they're Taylors.
Taylor has built its reputation on a combination of careful timber selection, consistent manufacturing, innovative design and genuinely comfortable playability. Those things matter, but the real pleasure comes when you sit down with one and discover how it responds to your own hands.
Because every guitarist brings something different to an instrument.
A fingerpicker might fall for the balance of the 212ce. A songwriter could disappear into the warm, woody character of the GS Mini. Someone looking for a serious long-term acoustic might find themselves staring at the 324ce and quietly recalculating their weekend budget.
We've all been there.
All three guitars have just arrived at Musicmaker, 29 Exchequer Street, Dublin 2, and we'd love you to come in and give them a proper play.
Try a few chords. Play that tune you've been working on. Compare the body shapes, feel the necks, listen to how the notes develop.
Take your time. That's what a good guitar shop is for.
Just don't blame us if you arrive intending to buy a packet of strings and leave with a Taylor.
Musicmaker. Independent minds. Serious gear. Glorious noise.
