Leading the way for Taylor's newly redesigned Grand Symphony body shape, the Builder’s Edition 816ce highlights the transformative Taylor design philosophy with lovingly crafted contours, an expansive acoustic tone, and player-focused enhancements. The ultimate playing experience begins with Indian rosewood back and sides paired with a Lutz spruce top, offering all the low-end warmth and sparkle you’d expect from the classic rosewood/spruce combination with additional bloom and resonance added by V-Class bracing. But this Builder’s Edition model truly shines in the details, starting with its most significant innovation: the soundport cutaway. Crafted to resemble a partial Florentine cutaway, the design keeps the guitar’s full back intact while still allowing easy access to the high-register frets. The additional soundhole adds a truly new dimension of acoustic sound, creating a wide-angle sound that would fit as well in a classical orchestra as it would a rock band or a fingerstyle solo act. For aesthetics, Taylor appointed this model with a host of their most player-centric features, including figured maple binding with chamfered edges and rosewood edge trim, a single-ring rosette in green abalone, Windansea inlays in shell and mother-of-pearl, and ultra-precise Gotoh 510 tuners in antique gold. The guitar ships with ES2 electronics in a deluxe Taylor hardshell case.