Taylor’s 517e Grand Pacific Builder’s Edition
With its unique round-shoulder dreadnought silhouette, revolutionary V-Class bracing, and dramatically different tonal personality, the 517e Grand Pacific Builder’s Edition blazes new ground for Taylor. Featuring premium all-solid tonewoods — neo-tropical mahogany for the back and sides and a torrefied Sitka spruce top — this alluring acoustic-electric guitar delivers a seductively bold and versatile tonal profile that is perfectly amplified by the onboard ES2 electronics. As your eyes drink in this instrument’s understated elegance, your hands savor its flawless playability while your ears revel in its warm, rich, organic tone. The 517e Grand Pacific Builder’s Edition is a feast for the senses.
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Grand Pacific: innovation and evolution
With the Grand Pacific, Taylor master luthier Andy Powers has fulfilled the potential of V-Class bracing as a robust tone-shaping platform. The Grand Pacific demonstrates proof-of-concept that V-Class architecture is an ideal cornerstone for guitars with a versatile range of musical personalities that will appeal to a broad swath of players cross-genre. Inspired by the diverse acoustic guitar sounds on the records he heard while growing up in Southern California, Andy set out to diversify Taylor’s tonal palette by designing a guitar with a different sound profile.
A bold new round-shoulder guitar from Taylor
Although V-Class bracing gave Andy more ways to control a guitar’s tonal character, Andy also knew a new body shape would be required, something with roughly the dimensions of a dreadnought. With V-Class, he could eliminate the undesirable sonic characteristics generally ascribed to dreadnoughts. All this led to the round-shoulder dreadnought design Taylor calls the Grand Pacific. The Grand Pacific’s overall sound is warm and seasoned, producing notes that overlap more to create a smooth, blended sound. Its wider waist delivers more low-frequency power; the problematic low-end woodiness often associated with dreadnoughts is eliminated by the V-Class bracing.
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 trade-off 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 are also more in tune with each other. Guitarists at Sweetwater are gobsmacked. But don’t take our word for it — pick up the superb Taylor 517e Grand Pacific Builder’s Edition and experience it for yourself!
Taylor master luthier Andy Powers
Exceptional tonewoods
Mahogany is treasured for its punchy midrange bloom and strongly focused, earthy, and somewhat dry fundamental without a preponderance of ringing overtones. An acoustic guitar with mahogany back and sides easily in a track is why engineers and studio guitarists tend to prefer “hogs” for tracking. The 517e Grand Pacific features back and sides of solid, responsibly sourced neo-tropical mahogany and a top of torrefied solid Sitka spruce with Taylor’s tone-enhancing V-Class bracing, which takes the guitar’s native versatility to an entirely new level. The torrefication process thermally cures the wood to deliver a more played-in tone, and together with the V-Class bracing, gives you a highly responsive and expressive instrument with increased dynamic range, robust projection and sustain, and harmonic synergy when chording up the entire fingerboard.
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 517e Grand Pacific. The key to this fantastic system is the three-section proprietary pickup located behind the saddle. Because of where it’s positioned and how it’s integrated into the guitar’s saddle, the ES2 pickup provides you with remarkably clear and accurate sound. In addition to a master volume control, a pair of 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 517e Grand Pacific Builder’s Edition Acoustic-electric Guitar Features:
- Neo-tropical mahogany body with Silent Satin finish
- Torrefied Sitka spruce top with V-Class bracing
- Compound Carve tropical mahogany neck with satin finish
- 15"-radius West African ebony fingerboard with 20 frets, grained ivoroid Arrowhead inlays, and wood binding
- 25.5" scale length
- Wood binding; black sapele/maple single-ring rosette
- West African ebony bridge, pins; Micarta saddle
- Taylor ES2 electronics
- 1.75" black graphite nut
- Taylor nickel tuners
- Dual-action truss rod, headstock access
