Taylor Guitars and Jacob Collier Release a Five-String GS Mini That Refuses to Be a Guitar

Jacob Collier’s whole musical vocabulary sits at an angle to convention. His signature instrument now does the same. Taylor Guitars has put out a five-string GS Mini acoustic, built to Collier’s specifications and aimed at players willing to unlearn a few fundamentals.

The guitar’s design dispenses with the low E string. The remaining five are tuned to an open C major chord—C, G, C, G, C, from lowest to highest—which uproots standard fretboard geometry. Chords that require no fingers sit alongside inversions that don’t exist on a regular six-string. Lead lines force new shapes. It’s a guitar that makes you sound like you’ve started from scratch, for better and worse.

Physically, the instrument retains the compact GS Mini body and a koa top, with a short 23.5-inch scale. That smaller footprint has always made the GS Mini a practical everyday acoustic, but here it serves a less straightforward purpose. The restricted string count and tuning deliberately box players in. You can’t wander into familiar blues phrases or campfire strumming without some recomposition. The palette is narrow and odd, which is precisely what Collier values.

The collaboration makes sense. Collier’s music is full of densely voiced harmony, microtonal gestures, and rhythmic dislocation. He doesn’t treat instruments as neutral tools. He treats them as specific vessels for specific ideas. This guitar extends that logic to anyone who picks it up. And for a small number of players—those who feel stuck or bored inside standard tuning—the limitation might feel like a door opening.

It’s hard to call it a mass-market instrument. The tuning alone limits repertoire. The aesthetic, with its pale koa top and minimal appointments, won’t sway traditionalists. But Taylor is not pretending this is a beginner’s guitar. It’s a deliberate oddity, a physical demand to rethink the fretboard. The guitar is available now through Taylor’s dealer network.