Taylor Guitars Gold Label 814e Super Auditorium Acoustic/Electric Guitar - Sunburst

Here's a completely original description written from scratch:

Taylor Gold Label 814e SB — Honduran Rosewood Acoustic-Electric Guitar (Sunburst)

There's a moment, somewhere between the first strum and the second, where a truly great guitar announces itself. Not loudly — great guitars rarely do. It's more of a settling, a rightness, a feeling that the instrument in your hands has been waiting its whole life to play exactly what you're playing. The Taylor Gold Label 814e SB is one of those guitars. And the sunburst finish means it looks the part before you've even tuned up.

Taylor's Most Ambitious Guitar

The 814 has long been Taylor's bestselling model — the guitar that defined what a modern acoustic-electric could be. The Gold Label 814e doesn't tweak that legacy. It reimagines it entirely. Andy Powers, Taylor's master guitar designer, spent years thinking about what acoustic guitars sounded like before amplification changed everything — the warmth, the bloom, the elastic dynamics of great pre-war flat-tops — and then rebuilt the 814 from the ground up to chase that feeling using every modern tool at his disposal.

What emerged is a guitar that sounds unmistakably like a Taylor and nothing like one at the same time.

The Super Auditorium: A New Shape for a New Sound

The Gold Label 814e SB wears a body shape Taylor has never made before: the Super Auditorium. Similar in proportion to the beloved Grand Auditorium but with a slightly longer body and wider lower bout, the Super Auditorium opens up the low end in a way that Taylor guitars historically haven't gone — warm, woody, and deep, with a fullness that ties the registers together rather than separating them into clinical precision. This is a guitar that blooms when you play it softly and commands attention when you dig in.

Honduran Rosewood: The Good Stuff

Not all rosewood is created equal. Honduran rosewood — denser, rarer, and more tonally complex than its Indian cousin — produces a bass response that's tight and defined rather than loose and boomy, with mids that are smooth and authoritative and trebles that ring clear without ever sounding harsh. It's the kind of tonewood that makes other players stop mid-conversation to ask what you're playing. The bookmatched back on this guitar, visible through the full-body gloss finish, is the kind of thing you never stop noticing.

Paired with a torrefied Sitka spruce top that's been roasted to unlock the aged warmth and responsiveness of a vintage instrument, the tonal pairing on this guitar is exceptional — each wood doing exactly what it does best, and the two of them together doing something neither could manage alone.

Engineering That Earns Its Price

Inside the body, Taylor's fanned V-Class bracing — six radial braces arranged in a fan-like pattern and set with traditional hot hide glue — generates a richer, more complex midrange than either standard X-bracing or Taylor's existing V-Class design. The result is more sustain, more volume, and a pitch accuracy across the fretboard that lets every note in a chord ring out clearly rather than collapsing into each other.

The new long-tenon neck joint is an engineering achievement that deserves its own mention. By improving the coupling between neck and body, it enhances low-end resonance in a way that changes how the whole guitar feels under your hands — more connected, more alive, more responsive. And because it's glueless, it offers precise adjustability that gives this guitar a setup-ability most acoustics can only dream of.

The Sunburst That Earns It

The Golden Brown sunburst on this guitar isn't an aesthetic afterthought — it's a statement. Glowing amber at the center, deepening to rich brown at the edges, it turns the torrefied spruce top into something that looks like it has sixty years of stories behind it. The Continental mother-of-pearl inlays running up the ebony fretboard, the engraved ivoroid/tortoise pickguard, the antique chrome Gotoh 510 tuners with ebony buttons, Taylor's new paddle headstock silhouette with script logo — every detail is calibrated to feel classic without feeling dated.

This is what a guitar looks like when aesthetics and function are designed together rather than applied separately.

Stage-Ready, Studio-Ready

The LR Baggs Element VTC electronics system is the right pickup for this guitar — warm, natural, and dynamically honest, capturing the full personality of the Honduran rosewood and torrefied spruce rather than flattening it into a generic acoustic signal. The controls are discreetly mounted in the soundhole so they're accessible without breaking the clean lines of the body. Plug in and it still sounds like the 814e SB. That's not easy. That's the point.

Ships with Taylor's deluxe hardshell case in British Cocoa exterior with graphite interior. Because this guitar deserves to travel safely.

The Details