Review : The Taylor T5z as an Electric Guitar

Nov 8

Hello everyone. I’ve written about the T5z in the past, but always in the context of an amplified acoustic or in a comparison with Fender’s Acoustasonic lineup. I promised no bashing of the Acoustasonic here, its horrible sales numbers are bashing enough.

I recently received a request for my thoughts on the Taylor T5z as a primarily electric guitar. I was curious, because I had always looked at as an acoustic that could go electric. But when I recently spoke to Billy from Taylor and then checked the Taylor website, it shows up under electric guitars. So a very fair question indeed.

What is the T5z

The T5z is a hollowbody guitar. This may make you think of a big jazz box but I would say think more along the lines of an Epiphone Casino. A true hollow body but in a thinline format. Yet it has the refined Taylor designed slim and fast bolt on neck. It comes from the factory strung with electric strings. There are actually three pickups, but you can only see one. The latest models have relocated the volume and tone controls to the front lower bout from the front upper bout where they had been placed since the original T5. Because it is a hollow body with f holes, similar to a Casino, it has a decent unplugged sound and you can definitely play it quietly in this manner, but it is by design, an electric guitar.

Specifications

There are three different families in the T5z line. There is the Classic, the Pro and the Custom. The Classic, which is what I have for this review, has Sapele as the body wood and offers the buyer the choice of Neo-Tropical Mahogany, Rosewood, Koa and Sassafras for the top. The Classics are listed at $2499 USD MAP. My review guitar’s top is Sassafras. The Pro model has Urban Ash for the body and Big Leaf Maple for the top. The tops are figured and are available in different dye colours. They are priced at $3299 USD MAP. The Custom is Koa over Urban Ash and is priced at $3799 USD MAP. All versions have a Venetian cutaway and are presently available for right hand only. Taylor does not allow all Taylor dealers to carry the T5z products. They are restricted to specific T5z certified dealers.

I am going to use the specs for the guitar that I have for review but except for the top wood, this will be common across all the Classic line and generally accurate for the others as well.

The body is made of multiple pieces of wood. The Classic body wood is Sapele, but Taylor does not specify it it is solid or not. So let’s get past that right now. This is designed to be an electric guitar, so the body wood has a lot less to contribute to the final sound. It is a narrow body, very similar to a Les Paul body in depth. Top and back are satin finished and the build quality is Taylor superb. The fretboard is Crelicam Ebony. The fretwork is excellent. The neck wood is Neo-Tropical Mahogany and the fretboard is bound in black. Scale length is 24 ⅞ inches and the nut width is 11 11/16 inches. Very comfortable for both acoustic and electric players. It presently comes strung with Elixir Nanoweb 11-49 strings anchored on an Ebony bridge with Micarta saddle and the nut is Tusq. Thus the bridge is an acoustic design, not a traditional electric design with individually adjustable saddles for intonation and string height. The neck has a headstock ajustable truss rod.

There are three pickups. The visible pickup is near the bridge and while it looks like a lipstick pickup it is actually a humbucker. There is another humbucker concealed inside the body underneath the end of the neck and there is also an acoustic body sensor pickup. The pickups are selected by a five way switch as follows

Position 1 : Neck Humbucker and Acoustic Body Sensor
Position 2 : Neck Humbucker
Position 3 : Bridge Humbucker
Position 4 : Neck and Bridge Humbucker in parallel
Position 5 : Neck and Bridge Humbucker in series

The volume pot is semi active. It acts like a normal volume pot from off to the centre detent but past that it starts providing a boost to push an accomodating amp into mild overdrive.

Both the bass and treble pots are active, meaning that turned up from the centre detent they boost and turned down from the centre detent they cut.

There is no way to individually control the output of the pickups and the output jack is mono only

Playing the T5z

In position 1 it sounds like an amplified acoustic and I would propose if this is the way you will play the guitar primarily you want a decent acoustic amplifier. Taylor actually just got into the acoustic amp game this year (2024) but I have never played through one and thus have no comment or insight. I played it through my AER Compact 60 and it sounded decent enough. The body sensor picks up body noise like mad. If you are percussive in your acoustic style, it will be heard. but so will your arm moving across the top of the body. It’s fine, but if you want an amplified acoustic guitar, in my opinion, you can get a much better sound for less money.

The other switch positions don’t use the body sensor at all and behave with the humbuckers only. They are very warm, with negligible bite with the tone controls at the neutral position, more bog box jazzy than thinline electric. Not a bad sound at all, but not a rocker’s electric. However if you play into a nice clean amp with plenty of headroom, the sound is very good. A Fender Twin Reverb, or a Roland Jazz Chorus are excellent amps here. These pickups do ok with pedals, but you will want to add an EQ pedal early in the chain if you want to use heavier overdrives or distortions because it can get boomy pretty quick. In my opinion, it sounds more big body Gretsch than ES-175, which as noted, is no bad thing.

I found myself either in neck only or bridge only most of the time. I really could not hear much of a difference between the pair in serial or parallel configuration. It’s there but it is really subtle.

The guitar is very light and creates no fatigue. If you like Taylor necks, this is old home week for you. The neck is smooth and easy to play and bends are straightforward although I would drop to 9s instead of 11s personally, and given the darker sound, would look to brighter strings overall.

I will say that playing the guitar into a Spark 40 was quite underwhelming. While I generallly like the Spark line, it is the wrong amp for this instrument. While I do not own one, a DSP based amplifier that has a decent acoustic option would be better I think, perhaps a BOSS Katana.

Recorded Samples

I have to confess that I struggled a bit to find an amplifier that brought out the T5z’s strengths and after running through several options chose a Fender Blackface Twin Reverb profile from Tone Junkie in my Kemper Stage. The samples here feature parts recorded in each of the five pickup selector positions.

Wrapping Up

The Taylor T5z is a unique instrument. It’s not an acoustic guitar with a pickup, and despite Taylor’s positioning of it, it’s not a hollowbody electric either. This is no way makes it a bad guitar, but it is, in my opinion, definitely a niche play. I prefer its single acoustic position to the egregious Fender Acoustasonic models, and it’s also a much better electric guitar than those things. If I wanted a true hollowbody electric, this would not be it though. It’s not electric sounding enough and I think it is very expensive for what it does. You cannot fault the build quality, nor the innovative approach to pickups that Taylor takes. It’s just not my kind of thing. Which in your context, should mean very little. If you are in the market for a hollowbody electric with a strong acoustic sound orientation, go play one and check it out for yourself.

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