Yamaha’s TAG3 C Guitar Lets You Play Along With Yourself

For all the fancy electric guitars and amps and the wide array of pedals I own and get to test, I spend the vast majority of my playing time with an old Guild acoustic on my couch. I find it easier to plunk through new songs in the living room, and the quick grab-and-go versatility of an acoustic guitar is impossible to beat.

How do you make something that is so utilitarian and easy even better? If you’re Yamaha with its new TAG3 C, you add audio actuators, a built-in looper, Bluetooth, and effects like delay and reverb, and you toss in a charging cable. In doing so, Yamaha created an astonishing piece of musical technology that fits in with everything I like about my usual acoustic guitar experience but makes me sound even better with less effort. It even has a great built-in tuner.

The looper, reverb, and delay effects allow you to practice difficult passages over yourself, work on solos over chord changes, and mess around with different styles and ideas. If you’re more of a pro than I am, you can use the Bluetooth functionality to make this the perfect guitar for ampless street performances or extended practices with backing tracks, just as long as your voice doesn’t need similar invisible help.

Guitar of the Gods

Guitar brands have been grasping at new technological straws with somewhat limited results for decades. Modern material science, 3D printing, and milling technologies have brought us new and exciting shapes, and there are more fantastic low-noise pickup options than ever before, but by and large very little that makes a guitar great to play has changed in a long while.

Lucky for players, Yamaha’s engineers have had a firm grasp on what makes a good acoustic guitar for all of that time. The TAG3 C looks to the untrained eye like a very nice acoustic guitar in a slightly smaller dreadnought cutaway shape. A solid Sitka spruce top, solid mahogany back and sides, and slippery ebony fingerboard are all hallmarks of a well-made acoustic from any era. The neck is slim and modern and playable, and it has a bright and clear tone despite a good amount of weight inside.

Photograph: Parker Hall