“A guitar that can easily be taken anywhere”: Guild has holiday practice covered with the Travel Spruce, a small-bodied short-scale with a “big sound”

Guild has expanded its travel guitar range with a spruce-topped version of its compact but mighty-sounding acoustic guitar.

The Travel Spruce shares much of the same specs as the its mahogany topped sibling – a guitar that you may well have seen in your, err, travels.

You may well have heard it, too, not least because of the Travel Mahogany’s arched-back body that is designed to help give this little acoustic more volume, projection and a fuller sound than you could reasonably expect of a 569mm short-scale instrument like this.

All those same dimensions are present and correct on the Travel Spruce. It, too, has the open-pore satin finish, the single-ply black pickguard with the Guild logo inlaid in gold. You will find the distinctive G shield logo on the headstock. You will find everything you need from a travel guitar and nothing you don’t. After all the golden rule is always to travel light.

Guild Travel Spruce Demo - YouTube

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Guild has used rosewood used for the fingerboard and bridge and gone with the classic tonewood cocktail for instruments at this price point; we have a layered spruce top giving it plenty of top-end information, with mahogany on the back and sides.

That said, there are no onboard electronics, so if you want to play amplified you’ll need to get yourself an acoustic guitar pickup and mount it yourself.

But played around the campfire, by the beach, up in the mountains? Guild promises a “warm and rich tone with a silky high end”.

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The fingerboard is inlaid with pearloid dots, and there are ABS side markers to help you navigate. Heck, you might get lost when backpacking across Yellowstone Park but at least the fingerboard is easier to navigate.

You’ll find Guild Vintage 16 open-gear tuners on the headstock, finished in all-black, and it a cowboy chord-friendly C profile neck that measures 22mm at the 1st fret and 23mm at the 9th. The fingerboard has a 16” radius, 19 frets, while the nut width is a wholly uncontroversial 43mm.

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Nick Beach, Guild’s product manager of fretted instruments, says the Travel Spruce is designed to be just that – a guitar you can take anywhere.

“Their compact size and light weight make them ultra-portable,” he says. “Their arched-back design results in a big sound with greatly increased sustain and projection.”

And it’s not just their size that makes them portable. Guild’s travel acoustics ship with a padded gig bag. The Travel Spruce is priced $249 street. Check out more details over at Guild.