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The Gibson G series are shite.
@DavidR makes a good point - good guitars don't need to come from the USA, there are now plenty of other options.
Here's a used 2013 400 series model currently for sale in the US ... at nearly 2000 bucks! In fact, in real terms, that guitar will cost more like $2,150 after tax and shipping have been added.
But I do remember when Taylor 300 and 400 series were around $1,000 brand new, and it wasn't that long ago.
Come on, you can diss any guitar by making a sweeping and unfounded statement like that. There are many reports of people who like them more than some of the more expensive models on account of the non-gloss open-pore finish.
In fact, buying non-gloss in the US can mean a good saving because Americans seem generally to prefer gloss to non-gloss. This topic has come up numerous times on the Acoustic Guitar Forum and others, and whereas many Europeans might see 'classy' in a matte finish, many Americans see 'cheap.'
I didn't like them at all.
The fit and finish were borderline agricultural.
And I really don't like matte finished acoustics.
Laminate backs are (almost always) just a cheap way to make a guitar. They (usually) sound like exactly that. They take a leaf out of the cheap furniture book.
Double tops are a more expensive way to make a very responsive guitar which (according to some) sounds better. Double tops take a leaf out of the high-performance sport construction book (e.g., racing yachts). I have only played one double top guitar, which was nice but not particularly my thing. I'd be happy to sample others some time.
The theory behind them is that most of the force on a stress-bearing object (a beam, a girder, a guitar top) is taken by the outside of it. This is why I-beams are shaped in an I or H. They are almost as strong as a solid rectangular bar but far lighter. However, those outside surfaces have to be held rigidly apart or they lose their "magic" strength.
For this reason, it is common to build high-performance items out of materials which have lightweight centres between strong outer surfaces. In natural materials, a popular combination is two very thin Western Red Cedar sheets held apart by a thicker layer of end-grain Balsa. The result is a very light, extraordinarily strong combination - in fact, the lightest, strongest thing there is short of modern artificial materials (e.g., substitute in expanded polystyrene foam instead of the Balsa, and glass, Kevlar, or carbon fibre for the cedar). Cut apart a Eurofighter or a 787: you'll find it's mostly composites (exotic mixes of materials using basically the same principles).
However, Bob Taylor has always stressed a kind of 'hierarchy' in guitar ownership. In his magazine "Wood and Steel," which I used to receive until they went paperless, part of the strategy seemed to be that one 'rose up through the ranks' of Taylor guitars. The sapele-backed 300 series was labeled an 'entry-level' Taylor, as though it was okay for an all-solid wood starter, but once we got more serious, we would want a 'better' (and more expensive!) wood like rosewood or pure mahogany.
And in his pictures of people playing his instruments, he nearly always had teenagers or people laughing with 100 and 200 series guitars. These were clearly aimed at youngsters learning their first C and G chords or adults 'just having fun.' As one went up the food chain, I remember a 500 series being played by what seemed to be a lowish-level female singer songwriter performing in a pub: clearly a serious musician but not flush with money, young, and still on her way up. At the top of the chain was the koa presentation model. I remember in one issue there was a slim, bespectacled serious-looking guy of about 40 dressed up like Steve Jobs in a black turtle-necked sweater sitting in a luxury basement beside a table with a fancy-looking computer on it: a youngish, forward-thinking tech executive or something of the sort.
I wonder if, in whatever incarnation "Wood and Steel" still exists, there are still pics of kids and laughing shop-floor level employees playing 200 series Taylors ... at $2,000 a pop!
Like with everything over the last year or so, prices have soared.
So it's easy to see someone getting the idea that a 335-style guitar (which looks just like a full-on archtop only smaller) should be made using the same methods and materials as the fully acoustic model.
(As an aside, acoustic archtops are quite often made with laminated construction. Yes, actual acoustic ones. Not the very best, but not by any means cheap and nasty either. Apparently this is considered OK because - let's face the facts here - an archtop is mainly designed to go "plink, plink" with bugger-all sustain in the first place, so who cares if it's laminated? It might even be an advantage. In archtopland, as I understand it, one isn't interested in the tone as such, but rather in the consistency of tone across the strings and all the way up the neck. Me, I tend to regard that as aiming at "bad tone on every fret" but I know that's not fair. And sooner or later I will buy one and find out for myself. I mean they look so very, very cool, how can they not be lots of fun to play?)
OED defines "laminate" as: (of wood, plastic, etc.) made by sticking several thin layers together.
Note the use of the word "several" which in turn is defined as: more than two but not very many.
So in order to comply with the OED definition a "laminate" structure would need to have a minimum of 3 layers.
Admittedly my own appreciation of "laminate" in the specific context of guitar construction doesn't quite tie in with the accepted definition of the word. I consider "laminate" to mean a structure that is made of multiple (i.e. 2 or more) layers of the same wood.
When different woods are layered together I consider it "ply".
When other non-wood materials are introduced, such as with double-tops, I tend to use the word "composite".
So, no matter how technically advanced the materials/processes/reasons for building double-tops are, they are still "made by sticking several thin layers together" and are still, by definition, laminate.
If I ask for all solid, it should be all solid!
Their 1 and 2 series models are remarkably good for what they are, but are comprehensively trumped by all-solid models at the same price and lower from Maton, Cole Clark, Furch, Takamine, and doubtless various others I am not familiar with. When you consider that all those companies just mentioned have much higher labour costs than Taylor in Mexico, and that they are building all-solid instruments from sustainable timbers, it shows up Taylor's very poor value proposition.
(I am not considering Chinese and Indonesian-made instruments. I wouldn't buy one and I don't care how good or bad they are, or how cheap they are, there is far too high a risk of them being made from illegally logged timbers. China in particular has a shocking record for this, and is only getting worse.)
(Nor am I a Taylor hater. Great company. One of these days I'm going to buy one of their superb all-Koa guitars. But their cheapies are way, way, way too dear.)