Interview by Dan, Fret Success Guitar Show
At NAMM 2026, I had the chance to sit down with Scott Paul, Director of Natural Resource Sustainability at Taylor Guitars, for a conversation that genuinely changed how I think about guitar building.
Scott is not who you’d typically expect to find at a guitar company. Park ranger in Costa Rica. Intern at the White House. Years spent at the United Nations working on international environmental policy. 14 years at Greenpeace running global campaigns. And then, through a ten year friendship with Bob Taylor, he ended up at one of the most beloved guitar companies on the planet.
His job is to make sure Taylor can keep building guitars in 50 years time. That’s not a trivial task.
An Inflection Point for Tonewood
Scott was clear about one thing from the start of our conversation. The time we’re living in right now is an inflection point for the entire musical instrument industry. For most of the 150 year history of the steel string acoustic guitar, sourcing wood was an afterthought. The traditional tonewoods, rosewood, ebony, spruce, maple, mahogany, were plentiful, cheap, and the world seemed full of old growth forest.
That world doesn’t exist anymore. When Taylor was founded 50 years ago, the global population was 4 billion. Today it’s just over 8 billion. Forest cover has diminished, quality has changed, prices have risen, and governments are reacting with new regulations that require transparency and accountability.
For a guitar maker buying a little bit of wood from all over the world, the challenges compound quickly.
The Ebony Fingerboard Story
The most striking story Scott told was about ebony. Twelve or thirteen years ago Taylor bought an ebony mill in Cameroon in an effort to vertically integrate their supply chain. Part of the motivation was making sure they were buying from legal, ethical sources. Central Africa is a complicated place to source from, and Bob Taylor’s view was that if Taylor owned the mill the buck would stop with them.
A few years into running the mill, something unexpected started happening. Trucks would arrive with wood and the local team would apologize because some of it wasn’t jet black. It was striped. Variegated. Taylor started asking questions.
Ebony had been the go-to wood for black fingerboards, black piano keys, black violin fittings for centuries. The assumption across the global market was that ebony simply came in black. It didn’t. In reality, roughly 50% of the ebony trees in the Congo Basin have a variegated heart, and the only way to know is to cut the tree down and look at it.
For decades, when a logger cut down an ebony tree and found the heart wasn’t pure black, they’d leave it on the forest floor and go find another one. Since 1950, roughly 50% of the ebony trees felled in the Congo Basin were left abandoned for cosmetic reasons alone.
When Taylor discovered this, Bob Taylor’s response was four words. “No, I’m buying those.”
They introduced variegated ebony fingerboards on the Taylor 814, their flagship guitar. Scott was clear that they took real criticism for this in the first few years. Forum users accused Taylor of using inferior wood, painting fingerboards that were flaking off, and compromising the quality of their instruments. Taylor kept telling the story. And now, if you walk into almost any guitar store, ebony fingerboards come variegated, and it’s considered normal.
It’s one of the things at Taylor Guitars Scott is most proud of being associated with.
Why Taylor Can Innovate
Part of why Taylor has been able to make these changes, Scott explained, is because of where they sit in the industry. In the acoustic world there’s Taylor and there’s Martin. In electrics there’s Gibson and Fender. Those other three companies are what Scott described as “legacy products.” Their customer bases expect guitars to be built exactly the way they’ve always been built. Changing screw types on a reissue is enough to generate complaints.
Taylor started in 1974. Bob Taylor himself made the neck thinner because he couldn’t get his hand around the traditional acoustic neck shape, not realizing that was seen as sacrilege at the time. Taylor’s customer base has grown up with innovation being part of the brand. That gives them what Scott called “a social license” to try new tonewoods and new designs.
Bob Taylor’s Philosophy
Throughout our conversation, Scott kept coming back to Bob Taylor as the person who makes this possible. Bob is, in Scott’s words, a Southern Californian laid-back guy, but with a profound personal sense of right and wrong that informs how he runs the company.
The line that stayed with me most was about mahogany. The British Empire planted mahogany throughout its colonies in Fiji, the Caribbean and elsewhere, and Taylor uses some of that wood today. Bob’s reflection on this is that some “long-dead British guy” planted trees that became useful a hundred years later, and Bob wants to be that long-dead guy himself. He wants to plant ebony in Cameroon and Koa in Hawaii, knowing he will never see those trees reach maturity. He doesn’t care. He just believes it’s the right thing to do.
Taylor has planted 60,000 ebony trees in Cameroon and 35,000 Koa trees in Hawaii. The Cameroon project is pure philanthropy. Scott’s view was that Bob is smart, endlessly curious, and deep down knows it’s the right thing to do as a human being.
The Pallet Guitar
Not all of the conversation was philosophical. Scott told me a story I hadn’t heard before about the Taylor pallet guitar. Years ago, before Scott joined the company, someone at NAMM told Bob that what was on display at the show wasn’t what customers would actually receive. That Taylor used the best wood for display models and cheaper wood for production. Bob took it as a challenge.
He went back to the factory and built a guitar out of actual wooden pallets and scrap wood from around the building. People picked it up, played it, and said it was an excellent guitar. Bob told them it was made of pallets.
That guitar is still around. A couple of them exist. And it’s probably the most famous Taylor guitar in the company’s history. Not because of the wood, but because of what it proved. The quality of tonewood matters, but the design and the builder matter more. In the right hands, a two piece or four piece top, a traditional wood or an alternative species, can all be made to sound remarkable.
What Guitarists Can Do
Near the end of our conversation I asked Scott what he thinks regular guitar players can actually do. He admitted it’s the question he dreads most because the answer sounds cliché. Educate yourself. Don’t be an internet troll. Read the sustainability page on the Taylor Guitars website, which he now writes for. Find some of the great books on humanity’s relationship with forests.
And when you buy a guitar, don’t buy it because of the brand. Don’t buy it because someone told you a particular tonewood is the best. Play ten guitars. Narrow it down to seven. Then five. By the time you’re down to three you already know which one has spoken to you.
Don’t be a slave to what’s been marketed to you.
Why the Guitar Matters
The last thing Scott said has stayed with me more than anything else. He’s spent his career at the United Nations and in international environmental policy, and he has observed something that consistently surprises the negotiators he works with. Most environmental conversations get partisan fast. But when you bring up musical instruments, something shifts. Every negotiator from every country realises they don’t want to stop the London Philharmonic from touring. Nobody wants to end music.
The guitar in particular is, as Scott put it, a cultural totem. He has given presentations in front of 500 people where the room is full of chatter until he simply holds up a guitar. Then silence. The instrument doesn’t need to be played to command attention. It’s a storytelling machine that transcends language, culture and politics.
His conclusion was sobering. If the world ever gets to a state where music and culture have to stop, we’re getting really close to the end. Clearly we can find a way to protect the planet and keep the music going at the same time. What’s the point otherwise?
Watch the full interview with Scott Paul on the Fret Success Guitar Show
Learn more about Taylor Guitars’ sustainability work: https://www.taylorguitars.com/sustainability
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