Takamine GJ72CE-12 NAT Jumbo 12-String Acoustic Electric Guitar Natural Gloss

The Takamine GJ72CE-12 NAT is the twelve-string that most players end up wanting once they have tried a few: a full jumbo body for the air twelve strings need, a solid spruce top over flame maple, and Takamine's TK-40D preamp on board so the guitar goes straight to a desk or an acoustic amp without a fight. It sits in the G70 line, the top shelf of Takamine's G Series, and it is finished in gloss natural with gold hardware and abalone trim.

A jumbo body, because twelve strings need the room

Twelve strings put roughly twice the string mass and a good deal more tension across the top than a six, and a small body simply runs out of air trying to move it. The jumbo shape here is the answer: 435 mm across the lower bout and 125 mm deep at the tail block, which is about as much cubic space as a steel-string gets. Strummed open chords bloom the way a twelve-string is supposed to, with the octave courses ringing on well after the pick has moved on, and the low end stays behind the octave shimmer instead of disappearing under it. A Venetian cutaway keeps the upper frets reachable, which is more useful on a twelve than people expect — capoed at the fifth or seventh is where a lot of this repertoire lives.

Solid spruce over flame maple

The top is solid spruce, and on a twelve-string that matters more than usual: a solid top keeps working and opening up under the extra tension where a laminate stays where it started. Back and sides are flame maple, which is a deliberate pairing rather than a cosmetic one. Maple is a bright, stiff, reflective timber that adds very little colour of its own, so the twelve-string's octave courses stay separated and articulate rather than smearing into one another. Put a mahogany or rosewood twelve next to this and the Takamine is the one where you can still hear individual strings inside a big open chord. The flame figure runs through the gloss finish on the back and sides, with multi-ply binding around the body and an abalone rosette in concentric rings around the soundhole.

The split saddle is the detail that counts

Look closely at the laurel bridge and the saddle is in two separate pieces, stepped against each other rather than sitting in one straight line. That is not decoration. On a twelve-string the wound octave strings need a different speaking length from the plain ones next to them, and a single straight saddle can only ever compromise between the two — which is why so many cheap twelves sound out of tune with themselves above the fifth fret. Splitting the saddle lets each group be intonated properly, so chords up the neck stay in agreement. The nut is synthetic bone, cut 47.6 mm wide to give twelve strings sensible room, and the courses are spaced so your fretting hand can still find single notes.

TK-40D: tuner, EQ and feedback control on board

Takamine's TK-40D preamp sits in the upper bass bout and covers everything a working player needs. There is a chromatic tuner built in, a three-band EQ with its own gain trim so you can match the guitar to whatever you are plugged into, and a mid contour switch that scoops or fills the midrange in one movement. A notch filter is there for the moment a jumbo body starts to feed back at stage volume — a big soundbox is loud, and that is exactly the body shape that finds a resonant frequency in a small room. An EQ bypass switch sends a flat signal to the front of house when the engineer would rather do the shaping themselves. Takamine has been building preamps into its own guitars for decades, and this is the same system found across the upper G Series.

Dressed the way a G70 should be

The slim maple neck carries a bound laurel fingerboard with a 12-inch radius — flat enough for comfortable barre chords, which is most of what a twelve-string does. Position markers are pearloid dots, with an abalone "reversed mountain" inlay at the twelfth fret, and the headstock wears a dark black walnut cap, cream binding and the gold Takamine script. Gold die-cast tuners with pearl buttons handle twelve strings' worth of tension, and the scale is 644 mm. A burgundy pearloid pickguard, gloss natural finish and multi-ply purfling finish it off. Set up in-store by Guitar World Australia's techs before it ships to you, so it plays perfectly the moment it arrives.