Playoff - Taylor T5Z Pro vs Fender Acoustasonic Telecaster Cocobolo

Okay let me get to some things straight off. I have done reviews of the Acoustasonics before and for my use cases found them wanting. The "Exotic" Telecaster Cocobolo is no longer made, in fact it looks like all the exotic Telecaster Acoustasonics are discontinued, but you can still get them in the Strat version. I once owned a Taylor T5 12 String and traded it in because it never produced a sound that I liked for what it cost.

What's new this time? This time I'm actively ignoring my own use cases and sticking specifically to playability (subjective), tone (subjective) and fit / finish (subjective). Am I saying that my reviews are subjective? Yup, just like every other review. I don't get anything for free, I don't get paid for these reviews and I am not sponsored, so that may make me different from other sources. Nuff said, moving on.

Consider the scenario where you are somewhat tight for space, like both electric and acoustic guitars and also like to get out and play in front of people. Yes, at this point in time, that last one sounds like a dream thanks to COVID-19, but let's be optimistic. Consider in this case you don't have the bucks for a bunch of guitars and amps, and for your own reasons, are willing to spend in the $4K CAD range for a do it all guitar. These conditions bring us to this point. A guitar that can be both acoustic and electric, work with a variety of amps, whether acoustic or electric, and possibly go through the amp or an interface to a recording program and or FRFR speaker system.

The first thing that I found starting from zero, is that these electric acoustics or acoustic electrics are pretty skint on the ground. We can certainly find hollow body electrics and acoustics with pickups but they really are electrics or acoustics, not both. To get that, the options are limited and I could not find anything inexpensive to fit the bill, so I went ahead to look at Fender and Taylor, two established makers of well made guitars.

Fender calls the Acoustasonics, acoustic electric guitars and ships them with acoustic strings mounted. They come packaged in gig bags for the low end models, but high end "exotics" come in a hardshell case. Taylor calls the T5Z an electric acoustic and ships them with electric strings. The entry models come in gig bags and the higher end models come in hardshell cases. We'll discuss string choice, but I much prefer hardshell cases if one is actually going to moving the instrument around a lot, particularly since the gig bags I checked out had about as much padding as a diaper bag. If you go this route and are fine with gig bags, get yourself a well padded third party bag. The factory ones are questionable. Which is nuts for guitars listing in the $3K CAD range, about as dumb as PRS selling the Silver Sky for $3K CAD with a crappy gig bag.

I did all my research and play testing with the guitars as they shipped from the factory. If I were to own either, the factory strings would get removed fast and replaced with a set of Monel strings from Curt Mangan. Monel is the material used to make strings prior to 1970 and works on both acoustics and electrics. It sounds wonderful.

The strings on the Telecaster are Fender Duratone Coated Phosphor Bronze 11-52s. A nice gauge with reasonable bendability, they feel coarse and sticky under the fingers. I cleaned them to be fair and the string cleaner that I use (Ernie Ball or Jim Dunlop, I use both) does make the strings smoother for sliding your fingers on. I respect that Fender does not make their own strings and while I own a substantial number of Fender guitars, Fender strings and I do not get along so I change them out for something I prefer, typically Mangans or D'Addario NYXLs.

The strings on the T5z are Elixir Medium Electrics. The gauge is not specified. They feel ok. Lots of folks love Elixirs. I am not one of them, but the cleaning regimen did improve the feel a bit. Taylor does use Elixir products on all their guitars, and on my Taylors, they have all been replaced with either Mangan Monels or D'Addario NYXLs.

We should not confuse the T5z with it's predecessor the T5. The T5 was a physically larger instrument. The T5z has a slightly smaller body, and is about the same size as the Telecaster. They both weigh in very close to each other. I don't put guitars on scales, I put straps on them and play standing up. Neither guitar is particularly fatiguing nor do they create pain points

Acoustic Tone

By acoustic tone, I mean no amp, no capture device, just hanging on a strap like a plain old acoustic guitar. Neither is particularly good this way, but in my opinion, in my space, the Fender gets closer to an acoustic tone. The Taylor is bright and has a nice voice but as it doesn't have much in the way of breathing holes in the top, and bass response is seriously lacking.

Woods

The Fender is one of the exotics which claims white limba sides, back and neck. The fingerboard is ebony, and pluses to Fender for using the natural colouration and not dying it black. Real ebony varies in colour unless you throw a lot of the tree away trying to get only the black wood. The Limba has very open pores which feels different to the hand, not unpleasant in any way, but the surface is rougher than what you might expect. It’s hard to get a nice smooth sanding or scraping on such porous wood. The top on this model is claimed to be Cocobolo. It has the figure of Cocobolo but none of the scent. The top appears to be laid into a recess in the body. In the standard Acoustasonics, the top wood is Sitka Spruce, a very common top for acoustics, although in most versions it is covered with what looks like a thin sheet of wallpaper. I'm not a fan. The overall finish is a satin urethane. I will be clear that I don't like satin finishes personally and think that this would be a much nicer looking and feeling guitar with a proper gloss finish and it it were up to me, it would be nitro-cellulose lacquer with a proper sanding job.

The Taylor T5z Pro has what I think are Sapele back and sides, with a Sapele neck and ebony fingerboard. I say think, because Taylor does not specify the body woods at all. The top on the unit that I am using is curly maple in what Taylor calls their denim stain. The bookmatching is excellent, like what you would expect from an American built PRS. The figure on the top is beautiful, the sides and back are painted dark so you would have no idea. You can see the top in the opening image. The neck is the same smoothness as one would find on other Taylor necks made from Sapele. Sapele is in the greater family Meliaceae which also contains mahogany but they are different species, even though Sapele is sometimes referred to as Sapele Mahogany. That maple top could be a reason for the very bright, limited bass acoustic only tone.

Pickups

Let's all just agree that these guitars are built to be used plugged in. Sure you can play them purely acoustically, but really you want an amp. For my money, I would suggest either a Yamaha THR30 or Boss Katana Air since both can run on batteries, and have decent amp simulations for both acoustic and electric amps. I used both in my tests because I found that when in a more acoustic mode, the guitars sounded best with acoustic amp sims, and when in electric mode, the guitars sounded best with electric amp sims. While both guitars claim to be able to mimic pure electric guitars, when doing so, I used no overdrives, distortions or fuzzes, because once you do, what the pickups are doing gets massively coloured.

The Fender uses a special solution from Fishman. It is based on their Aura technology, you could call it computational audio but that would be incorrect as really it's a set of preset equalization curves attached to pickup selectors. Fender calls it a very fancy marketing name, Stringed Instrument Resonant System or SIRS. It's a combination of good physics in terms of air motion and Fishman's processing. It's probably only me, but when makers start making up names for what they've done, acronyms set off my BS detector. All that really matters is that these guitars sound pretty good recorded.

Sample Sounds - Fender Acoustasonic Telecaster Exotic Cocobolo

Fender counts switch positions away from the bridge, so opposite to how Taylor does it. Since I recorded every example moving the selector starting farthest from the bridge, that accounts for the counting down for this selection. Each switch position offers two distinct sound accessed by the Mod knob, and of course you can blend the sounds together. In every recording I ran direct from the guitar into my UA Apollo interface and that was the interface used with Logic Pro X. For positions 5 through 2, I used no amplifier simulation, so this is basically right to the board. For position one, I used the Logic Pro X amplifier sim for a Fender Blackface Twin Reverb. All samples were saved as WAV and converted to MP3 afterwards for upload.

Switch Position 5 Spruce / Rosewood Dreadnought

Switch Position 5 Spruce / Rosewood Auditorium

Switch Position 4 Spruce / Maple Parlour

Switch Position 4 Spruce / Mahogany Dreadnought

Switch Position 3 Spruce / Brazilian Rosewood Dreadnought

Switch Position 3 Spruce / Brazilian Rosewood Dreadnought with Body Pickup

Switch Position 2 Spruce / Mahogany Dreadnought

Switch Position 2 Spruce / Mahogany Dreadnought with Bridge Pickup

Switch Position 1 Telecaster Bridge Pickup CLEAN

Switch Position 1 Telecaster Bridge Pickup FAT

Sample Sounds - Taylor T5z Pro

Taylor numbers the switch positions with the count starting at 1 farthest away from the bridge. In every recording I ran direct from the guitar into my UA Apollo interface and that was the interface used with Logic Pro X. For positions 1 and 2, I used no amplifier simulation, so this is basically right to the board. For positions 3-5, I used the Logic Pro X amplifier sim for a Fender Blackface Twin Reverb. All samples were saved as WAV and converted to MP3 afterwards for upload.

Switch Position 1 Body Pickup Only

Switch Position 2 Body Pickup and Neck Humbucker

Switch Position 3 Bridge Humbucker

Switch Position 4 Both Humbuckers in Parallel

Switch Position 5 Both Humbuckers in Serial

Judge for yourself of course. In my opinion, both instruments would do ok into a front of house DI for the acoustic settings or an electric guitar amp for the electric voices.

And that could be a problem if you are looking to keep the weight down but also know that amplification is going to be necessary. If you were just playing the guitar in acoustic mode, and perhaps singing, a simple small PA with two inputs could do the job for you very well. Alternatively you could play through a board that does different amp simulations and feed it to the house PA. I would use my Kemper Profiler Stage for this and have built rigs to do just that, using an AER 60 amp sim and a Fender Super Reverb amp sim. This also allows me to create some simple effects chains in device that I might be inclined to use including a compressor, an equalizer, a nice spring reverb, and for me a very subtle tape delay.

A less expensive option would be a small Boss Katana amplifier. For digital amps, they are pretty impressive and because there are no tubes, you don’t need a crane to lift them. Perhaps consider a Katana 50 Mk II with an accessory footswitch. It also has an AUX in so you could include backing tracks if you wished. Weight is about 25 pounds

A Last Test

My last play / listen test was to specifically hear the guitars through a proven acoustic amp. I had tried my old Fishman Loudbox and it was ok, but I did not like it. To be fair, I am not fond of the Loudbox and bought an AER 60 Tommy Emmanuel on Reverb from a dealer in Western Canada offering a new one at an amazing deal. It arrived just in time, before the guitars had to go back.

Both guitars in acoustic mode sound great through the AER. I played my Taylor BTO Spruce / Cocobolo as well. Neither the Telecaster nor the T5z sounded as good as the Taylor BTO, but it’s probably not fair to do a side by side. Without comparison right then and there to a full bodied acoustic, both sounded on point after playing for a few minutes to overwrite my audio memory. The Taylor T5z only really has one and a half acoustic modes, otherwise it’s a semi-hollow electric but it was completely believable and feedback free even at louder volumes. The Telecaster has seven all acoustic modes and offers more versatility in terms of tone options than the Taylor in that regard. I cannot say that I liked one more than the other, only that they are different. Using either guitar in their electric voices through the AER was shrill and unpleasant, the same as I found when going direct with no amp sim in Logic.

In The End

I said at the beginning that I would ignore my personal use cases and for the most part, I was successful, except when I started thinking about gigging and the realization that I would need more than one amp, either physically or via a device like the Kemper Profiler Stage.

If you are more driven by acoustic versatility, the Fender is your tool. It’s built to be an amplified acoustic with a couple of electric guitar options. If you are more electrically inclined but want the option for an amplified acoustic tone, you get two credible acoustic options and three electric options.

In the case of the Fender there is a lot of audio preprocessing happening in front of the output. I cannot say for the Taylor because the information they provide about the internals is very limited. To my experienced ear, something is happening between the string and the output but I cannot tell you what.

They are both nice guitars to play, have excellent necks and do not create fatigue. They sound really good when set up with the right amplification and are easy to transport. Their downside is their cost. which in my opinion is much more than they should be. I am very fortunate to have been able to use top of line variants of each, but I think even the standard units are overpriced. Once could find a good dedicated electric and a good dedicated acoustic with pickup together for less than the cost of one of the base units of either of the tested guitars. You would not get a pair built in America for that cost, but there are awesome guitars being built in other countries that sound really good when amplified. The T5z units do not seem to move as quickly as the Acoustasonics do in stores based on a highly unscientific shelf watch. Of course, Fender puts a lot o advertising dollars into the Acoustasonic family although now with focus primarily on the Acoustasonic Stratocaster. Taylor puts their advertising money into their regular acoustics.

Did I like them? Certainly, but neither will be staying. In that regard, my own use cases take over, and I just don’t need / want one of these type instruments. The good news is that what is right for me should be irrelevant to you. Focus on your needs / wants and you will be in good shape.

I want to extend my thanks to the owners and team members at The Arts Music Store in Newmarket, Ontario for working to make it possible for me to do this comparison. Whether you are in the Newmarket area or shopping on the web, they are a superb store with extraordinary customer focus.

Thanks for stopping by, until next time, peace.