Taylor 614ce LTD 50th Anniversary Collection

A maple and spruce grand auditorium in a transparent white finish.

August 21, 2024

Taylor continues to celebrate five decades of guitar making with its 50th Anniversary Collection. We’ve already had a chance to demonstrate several of the Anniversary Collection’s instruments since their release in January, and recently we had a chance to add the 614ce LTD to the list. In this video, I demo the limited edition variant of a grand auditorium favorite.

Taylor has used maple for the backs and sides of its guitar since the company’s very beginning, and it formalized the choice with the creation of the 600 series in 1978. Although the 600s’ styling has varied significantly over the years, the combination of maple back and sides, a spruce top, and series-specific appointments has remained constant. Because of its light color, maple is a logical choice when you want to give a guitar a little color, and since the beginning Taylor has built many custom instruments and some limited editions with transparent color finishes, often with spectacular results.

For the 50th Anniversary Collection 614ce LTD, Taylor chose a unique transparent white edgeburst finish. On the body, the finish is transparent enough to allow both the Sitka spruce’s top grain and the big leaf maple’s figure to be visible, while the white finish on the back of the neck and peghead are more opaque. The guitar’s appointments are similar to a current standard 600-series guitar and include a wide single-ring abalone rosette, tortoise binding with black-and-white purfling, and “wings” position markers in the fingerboard, but while standard 600s have Italian acrylic inlays, the LTD has the same design in abalone. The guitar has no pickguard and, like the other 50th Anniversary Collection instruments, it includes a special commemorative label on the inside.

Given the consistency of Taylor’s setups, there are no surprises in how the 614ce LTD feels. Low action, excellent fretwork, and the typical low-profile Taylor neck result in easy playability. Tonally, my first impression was that the instrument dispels the myth that maple guitars are inherently bright sounding. When Taylor redesigned the line in 2015, it tweaked the design of the 600-series models to offer a richer, warmer tonality, and the 614ce LTD clearly benefits from that change. The guitar has a well-rounded overall sound with a rich bottom end and balanced highs, and it impressed me with a tonal neutrality that was highly adaptable to whatever playing style I threw at it. This makes the 614ce LTD the kind of guitar that puts the player in charge, and is a quality that tends to make the guitar shine when being recorded. Plugging the guitar into our Fishman Loudbox amp further reinforced this character. Taylor’s ES2 electronics are known for being among the more transparent systems available, and in this guitar, they offered excellent clarity and controllability.

Overall, the 614ce LTD has a winning combination of looks and great sound. Whether you’re attracted to the guitar by its appearance or its well-behaved sound, it is sure to deliver solid performance in many musical settings!