Being fairly new to Guilds, here's a question to all the D-40 players...
Hi Ben, welcome aboard!
Before I forget, be advised that new members' first few posts are vetted to ensure you're not a spambot, then everything'll start showing up in real time.
These new Oxnard D-40 Trads have the spruce top and the adirondack spruce bracing, supposedly adds more bottom end.
The new "standard" D-40 has just the normal "red" spruce bracing.
"Red Spruce" and "Adirondack" are synonymous.
When they call these "Traditional", are they referring to being traditional to the older D-40s?
Basically yes.
In Oxnard, the D40 Standard version uses a mortise-and-tenon neck mounting system, it is in fact a "bolt-on" and that fact caused some irritation here when it was discovered quite by accident in a factory video IIRC..
A credible argument was made by some that Oxnard had been less-than-forthcoming about the introduction of this construction technique, which Guild had never used before.
There's debate about whether that type of neck joint can sound as good as a
"traditional" glued-in dovetail.
The "Standard" was the first version of the D40 built by Oxnard and also uses a catalyzed varnish satin finish.
To be fair this was pretty early in Oxnard's history and they needed to get product to market to keep the wheels turning, and the more economy-minded builds were most likely to get sales momentum re-stablished.
A while later they introduced the D40 Traditional using traditional full-gloss NCL finish and a glued-in dovetail neck joint.
Those are the 2 most important construction detail differences in my opinion, and suspect the difference you can hear between the 2 is most likely due to the neck joint.
I can hear the difference between the newer versions, but do older Guild D-40s sound more like (and built like) the "standard" or the "Traditional"?
Haven't had the opportunity to play any other factory's versions of a D40 than my own, but just based on the 2 details mentioned above they're going to sound more like the "Traditional".
BTW if you want to learn more about build details of previous factories, this site is the most comprehensive and cohesively laid-out collection of catalogs and price lists on the entire net, thanks to the efforts of our member GAD:
https://www.gad.net/Blog/guild-guitar-price-lists/
And unless you're specifically intent on buying a new guitar (which I get, it's the only way to get a warranty for example, and I bought all mine new), you may also want to look at the D40 Bluegrass Jubilee model from around '07 up through '12 I think it was.
Those guitars from Tacoma and NH featured Adi
tops and bracing, but
only the ones from Tacoma and New Hartford (and only the Bluegrass Jubilee version) had Adi tops.
Prior to that the Bluegrass Jubilee was simply a name given to the original D40 introduced in '63, Guild liked to give names to the models at the time, up through about the mid- '70's.
And they never used Adi until Tacoma, only sitka.
Generally, in the New Hartford days, Traditional meant specs and construction reminiscent of Westerly era. Standard meant they had changed something in a way that made it more "modern"or cheaper to produce. Satin necks are the one thing I am sure of but I think bracing was different as well.
Never heard of a bracing difference, was red spruce all the time in NH as far as I can recall, but the cost savings definitely applied with the satin finish and "bling" factors.
Note for example the NH F50 "Standard" didn't get block inlays, only dot markers, a first for any F50:
I don't know what Oxnard is up to but it makes sense that "Traditional" refers to Guild's history and not the marketplace as suggested elsewhere.
Yes in fact the "Traditional Series" name first popped up in Tacoma price lists (example:
https://www.gad.net/Blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Guild-2007-02-Price-List.pdf)
****
It distinguished the models built according to the standard time-honored Guild formulae and model numbers, from the ill-fated "Contemporary Series" which used the bolt-on neck system* as the primary distinguishing build detail.
*(@ben42thomas: this was an entirely different animal than the current mortise-and-tenon method and can be seen in one of the '06-'09 Tacoma-era catalogs)
**** Edit 11/25:
Guilty of poor wording there, technically they used the term "Traditional Series" as far back as '87 to denote the new GF- series 16" jumbos based on the Gruhn updates of the F40 in '84.
But never saw it applied
to dreadnoughts until Tacoma.