Customs Built
to Inspire
Explore our Customs gallery to discover the works of craftsmanship and art produced by the Taylor Customs program over the years…and today.
Imagining a Custom Taylor guitar
The Taylor Custom program is designed to bring a truly unique instrument to life. With Taylor’s full range of model options, tonewoods, body shapes, aesthetic details and design features at your disposal, we work to select specifications that match any playing styles and musical sensibilities, producing a one-of-a-kind heirloom-quality instrument.
Get inspired by proceeding to our gallery of custom guitars OR, if you have something special in mind, visit your local authorized Taylor retailer.
Guitar Gallery
Taylor Concierge
We love that each and every guitar player has unique aesthetic tastes and musical influences. Through our custom guitar program, a player has the opportunity to combine elements from a curated collection of body sizes, tonewoods and visual details to create a personalized, one-of-a-kind instrument that reflects their individuality.
Andy Powers
Frequently Asked Questions
The standard Taylor lineup of acoustic guitars offers a wide array of options in tonewoods, body shapes, visual appointments and other features. Still, we know that sometimes, guitar players have something in mind that simply doesn’t exist in our regular line. That’s where our custom guitar program comes in.
Our custom guitar program makes it possible to design and build the Taylor guitar of your dreams. Working alongside an authorized Taylor dealer, you can select from a huge array of features to craft a guitar that suits your musical needs, your aesthetic tastes and your playing style. Our custom shop can help you select a body shape, woods, visual details and more, allowing you to build a custom instrument that inspires you at every level. We all have a dream guitar in mind—the Taylor custom guitar program can make it a reality.
If you’re a fan of Taylor, there’s a good chance you’ve seen a custom Taylor guitar before. Throughout our history, we’ve built custom guitars for several well-known musical artists, including the famous purple guitar we built for Prince and the stunning aquamarine koi guitar we designed and built in cooperation with Taylor Swift, which she brought back into rotation during her recent Eras Tour. If there’s a particular Taylor guitar played by an artist you love, let your salesperson know—it might provide some helpful inspiration while you order your custom guitar.
At the moment, Taylor custom guitars are available exclusively through our authorized dealer network. Our custom program involves a great deal of detail—acoustic guitars are complex systems of interworking parts, and it’s important to have some expertise on hand to help you order a custom guitar that matches your expectations.
To start designing your custom guitar, visit or contact a salesperson at your favorite local guitar shop and let them know you want to start designing a custom Taylor. They’ll provide you with a list of options and help you select features that will create the final product—both in tone and visual style—that you have in mind.
When you start to order a custom Taylor guitar, you’ll receive a list of features within certain criteria that you’ll need to consider and select. Here’s a rundown of the foundational design elements that go into building a custom acoustic guitar. Keep in mind that this is just a starting point—there are many features available that aren’t listed here, and because some features or options may not always be available through our custom shop, your salesperson is always the most reliable source of truth.
Body Shape
Taylor offers an array of body shapes in varying sizes and profiles, each with their own tonal properties and feel. From smallest to largest, here are the body shapes that Taylor produces. Not all of these body shapes may be available for custom builds.
- Baby Taylor*
- Big Baby*
- GS Mini*
- Grand Concert
- Grand Auditorium
- Super Auditorium*
- Dreadnought*
- Grand Pacific
- Grand Symphony*
- Grand Orchestra
*Not currently available
Woods
Next up, you’ll need to select woods for your custom guitar. These fall into two broad categories: top woods and back and side woods, plus the additional category of fingerboard woods. Keep reading to the next question to learn more about available options for back/side and top woods.
Fingerboard Woods
Because of the amount of wear and tear that your guitar’s fretboard will experience, only a select few materials can be used as fingerboard woods in acoustic guitars. In the vast majority of our guitars, we use West African ebony that’s responsibly sourced from our Crelicam ebony mill in Cameroon, Africa—an endeavor that also helps fund important research into ebony forest ecology as well as replanting projects that have seen tens of thousands of new ebony and fruit trees planted in Cameroon in recent years. You can learn more about those developments at our Sustainability Hub.
Aesthetic Appointments
Our custom guitar program allows you to design your new guitar with a high degree of detail. The following appointments may be selected for your custom guitar depending on availability of materials at the time of ordering, all crafted to the exacting standards of the highest quality craftsmanship you would expect from any Taylor guitar.
- Finish: Choose from gloss, matte or Silent Satin finishes.
- Color treatment: Options include natural, sunburst, shaded edgeburst, Kona Burst, and other beautiful colors.
- Binding and edge treatment: Materials include Italian acrylic, a variety of woods or celluloid (such as faux tortoiseshell), as well as unbound configurations with chamfered body edges for enhanced playing comfort.
- Inlays: Choose from a range of inlay designs for your fretboard, bridge and/or peghead. Available designs include those you’ll find across our standard lineup, from simple diamonds or dots to more elaborate inlays such as Element (800 Series), Island Vine (Koa Series), Finial (500 Series), California Vine (Presentation Series) and many others. Materials include grained ivoroid, mother of pearl, shell, abalone, and woods such as maple, koa, or cocobolo. You may also be able to select legacy inlay designs featured on past models or series that have been discontinued. You can talk to your dealer representative or contact Taylor’s customer service department for a list of available designs.
- Hardware: This spec refers to elements such as strap pins and sometimes tuning machines, though we often consider those a separate choice in your custom build. Choose from black, chrome or gold hardware or ask your dealer if more choices are available.
- Tuners: Tuning machines can add a striking visual accent to your guitar while also sometimes improving tuning precision. Standard options include polished bronze, black or nickel tuners, while upgraded choices include ultra-precise Gotoh 510 tuning machines with a 21:1 gear ratio, usually available in antique gold or antique chrome. Gotoh Luxury tuners, which feature artful designs on the tuner buttons, may also be available. We can also craft tuners with wood buttons featuring abalone or other inlay materials if you want to add a truly unique visual element to your custom guitar.
- Pickguard: If you’d like to add a pickguard to your custom build, you can choose from traditional materials like celluloid or upgrade to a beautiful wood pickguard in rosewood or maple. Some pickguards also include inlay options if you want to add a secondary visual accent.
- Rosette: Rosettes (the decorative rings around the soundhole) add another distinctive element to your guitar’s visual personality. Our custom shop can craft rosettes in a variety of materials, including various woods, shell and acrylic/ivoroid.
Yes! We offer a range of tonewood options for both the soundboard (top) and back and sides of your custom guitar. Here’s a rundown of the available options that will allow you to build the custom instrument of your dreams.
Top Woods
The top wood is the portion of the guitar that has the most influence on the guitar’s tone, because it’s the component that vibrates the most when you strike the strings. Here are the woods we use for acoustic guitar tops. Keep in mind that some of these, such as maple, are rarely used as top woods and may not be available for your custom guitar.
- Spruce (Sitka, Adirondack or Engelmann; torrefied spruce also available)
- Mahogany
- Sinker Redwood
- Western Red Cedar
- Walnut
- Hawaiian Koa
Body Woods
Body woods, also called back and side woods, add seasoning and sonic nuance to the guitar’s overall voice. Some woods yield a richer bass response, while others may have more of a midrange focus. To learn more about the various sonic traits of these woods, you can browse our body woods page or visit the Wood&Steel product guide tonewood section. Here are the standard back and side wood options that will usually be available for custom guitars.
- Indian Rosewood
- Honduran Rosewood
- Hawaiian Koa
- Big Leaf Maple
- Mahogany
- Red Ironbark
- Shamel Ash
- Sapele
- Walnut
- Figured Blackwood
- Blackheart Sassafras
- Tasmanian Myrtle
If you browse the Taylor Custom Guitar Gallery, you’ll find several other body woods that aren’t listed here, such as black limba, cocobolo, macassar ebony, bocote, tiger myrtle or katalox. These are less common woods and we often don’t have them in stock, so if you’re interested in one of them, you’ll need to have your salesperson check with our custom shop directly.
In addition to top, back and side woods, players can also choose a fretboard wood. Options for fingerboard woods are more limited—standard West African ebony is the default choice, but players can also opt for a more colorful, variegated set of ebony for aesthetic reasons. Other options such as Honduran rosewood may be available as well.
Wait times may vary for custom guitars based on the features you choose, but typically, we estimate your guitar will be completed after 60 to 90 days from your order.
Players can order any type of custom guitar based on specifications available in our standard line—our tooling and manufacturing capabilities shift in accordance with what we’re producing at any given time, so a guitar type that was manufactured several years ago may not be available today. Custom options are also limited to what we produce in our headquarters factory in El Cajon, California, so builds based on our GS Mini, GS Mini Bass, Baby Taylor and Big Baby guitars are not available for custom orders.
Currently, players can order standard six-string steel-string acoustic guitars, six-string nylon string acoustic guitars, 12-string acoustic guitars, baritone acoustic guitars (both six- and eight-string) and 12-fret acoustic guitars. It’s also possible to order custom electric guitars from Taylor based on our T5z hybrid hollowbody design, which boasts a unique three-pickup configuration consisting of two humbuckers and an acoustic body sensor. The T5z incorporates five-way switching that lets you shift between distinctive tonal flavors on the fly, making it a highly versatile option that can perform in a wide range of musical scenarios.
Because Taylor does not produce acoustic bass guitars or their electric counterparts, these are not available for custom orders.
Other limitations for custom guitars from Taylor include using wood sets provided by the customer and creating custom guitars based on a design the customer has sketched in advance. We are currently only able to accommodate custom orders that include the options available through a representative at your local authorized Taylor dealer.
