Let’s be honest, that’s not an attractive bridge. It’s seen a lot of action over the years and it’s cracked and, somewhere in the distant past, it’s had some gunky filler splodged in to try extend its life.

And it’s actually a slightly odd bridge. Although it has six holes for bridge pins, you can see along the back there are some filled holes as if this bridge were once strung from the top. There are also two little pearl dots which are usually present to hide small bolts (as they do in this case). These bolts are generally used on bridges that string from the top. But, then, why the bridge-pin holes?

It seems likely that the manufacturer repurposed this bridge from another model, filled the string holes and installed with bolts as normal. Fair enough.

This is all an aside anyway. On to the real work.

The owner wants this sorted but I wasn’t able to source an off-the-shelf replacement. This means custom-malking a replacement.

Getting these things off is a pain—as well as the two little bolts under the pearl, this manufacturer epoxies the bridge in position. I may have used swear words.

Once off, though, I grab a nice piece of rosewood and thickness it to about the right height. I carefully measure and mark off the important dimensions, particularly the pin holes and the bolt holes—if these are misaligned or misplaced, the bridge has to go in the bin.

Some careful drilling and we’re ready to shape the bridge. In this case, it’s a (relatively) easy job as the original doesn’t have a lot of sharp edges to curves that need to be replicated. It’s easier to replicate those sweeping lines.

Re-attaching the bridge, in this case, means epoxy again. There’s a major risk of the bridge sliding about as it’s clamped so some very careful preparation was necessary to ensure this didn’t happen. Pin-holes and the bolts came in useful in this.

And, you can see the end result in the last image. As it’s a nicer piece of rosewood, I think the new bridge actually looks better than the original but, that aside, it’s certainly more sound.

Time to break up all this Burlesque talk with something a little different.

What’s going on here, then?

Intonation. It’s a bug-bear for some. We could talk about equal temperament concerns and mathematical subdivisions of scale-length and whatnot, but it would get dull quickly. Suffice it to say, tuning on any fretted instrument is always a little bit of a compromise.

In order to try get the damn thing to sound as closely in tune as possible, we ‘intonate’ each string to compensate its length so it sounds right when fretted. On most electric guitars, we do this by adjusting the string’s saddle—moving it backwards or forwards to slightly lengthen or shorten the string’s sounding length. Easy-peasy (unless it’s a Floyd Rose-type bridge in which case it’s more annoying than being repeatedly kicked in the shin by a crying child in a restaurant).

Acoustic guitars offer a bit more of a challenge than most electrics though.

An acoustic guitar generally has a fixed saddle (of bone or whatever). The fact that the saddle is installed at a slight angle (increasing string length from 1st to 6th) string is a nod towards some string compensation. The pre-shaped, compensated saddles that many guitars have these days is another step in the right direction.

For most people (and most guitars and strings) these get close enough that tuning issues aren’t glaringly awful.

Sometimes, and for some people (depending on playing style and the curse of having a good ear), it’s not enough.

Intonation depends on precisely seventeen million variables. Well, give or take—there are a lot of factors that all interact to determine the best setting. Tweaking setup and string choice can help if there are problems but sometimes that’s not an option or isn’t sufficient.

What’s going on in the images above is that I’ve used little chunks of rosewood to individually intonate each string on this acoustic guitar. The saddle has been removed and the rosewood is acting like an individual saddle for each string. I poke it back and forward to find where each string properly intonates.

StewMac actually offers a doohickey that does this without fiddling with bits of wood. I’ve been threatening to get one for a while but I’m forgetful and tight.

Popping a piece of cellophane over the bridge lets me mark the location of each intonation point and the actual saddle location itself. This gives me an indication of where each string should sit on the saddle to sound best. It’s easy to transfer this to a new saddle blank.

This guitar, its setup and strings, actually indicates a complication: As you can see in the image in the right, some of the optimum intonation points sit outside the actual saddle.

This happens sometimes. On an older guitar, it’s not unusual to have a saddle actually misplaced. This can necessitate filling the slot and actually re-routing it in a new position. That doesn’t tend to happen so much these days but, depending on other factors, it’s possible that one or more intonation points might be in front of, or behind, the saddle.  Of course, making a much wider saddle is an option but that adds expense and entails modifying the bridge to accommodate that wider saddle.

The other option is compromise (we’re back to that word again). In this case, carving a new saddle with intonation points as close as possible to those measured will improve things considerably. Four of six strings will be pretty much perfect and the remaining two will be a lot closer to perfect than they originally were. Overall, it sounds much more in tune than it did without the need to irreversibly modify the bridge to accommodate a wide saddle.

So, we end up with a slightly odd looking saddle that sounds a lot better and the original is safe in the case in case it’s ever needed. Not too shabby.

It’s worth remembering that this is probably overkill for the majority of people. Most guitars and guitarists are generally ok with the regular or pre-compensated saddle. Failing that, a good setup or a change of string-gauge will probably get you close enough that you’ll be happy. If you’re still hearing problems though, a custom-compensated saddle might be an option.

I’m really pleased that Haze Guitars can now offer the Buzz Feiten Tuning System.

Odds are, unless you’ve been living in a small cave in the mountains, you’ll have heard about the Buzz Feiten system and you’ll probably know something of what it can do.

Even a guitarist with the tinnest of tin-ears will know that his or her perfectly tuned guitar won’t sound completely in-tune all over the fretboard. Different positions and different chord shapes can give that unpleasant out-of-tune wobble that’s really irritating. And, if you’re heading to the studio with this going on, it can get well beyond irritating.

Intonation is the means by which we tweak the sounding length of each string to improve these tuning issues but, for some people, it doesn’t get close enough.

It wasn’t close enough for Buzz Feiten. So he did something about it. Now you can too.

Fitting the Buzz Feiten Tuning System on your guitar

The Buzz Feiten Tuning System can be retrofitted onto pretty much any electric guitar or bass. Most installations do not need to make any permanent modifications to the instrument. The existing nut is replaced with a BFTS ‘shelf’ nut which is custom cut to each particular guitar during installation and the intonation is modified based on the system’s sweetened tunings.

The result is an instrument that sounds much more in tune all over the neck and across all chord shapes. It’ll work with capos, and altered tunings too.

The only visual indication that your guitar has been modified is that the nut appears very slightly wider than normal (about 1mm or even less). That, and a tiny, serial-numbered, sticker indicating that the BFTS has been properly installed by an authorised fitter Note: you don’t have to stick this to your guitar if you don’t want but keep it in the case as confirmation in case you ever sell on the instrument. The BFTS system is tightly controlled and the sticker is sort of like your ‘certificate of authentication’.

As far as I know, Haze Guitars is the only place in Ireland that you can have the Buzz Feiten system retrofitted to your electric guitar or bass. If you’ve struggled to get your guitar sounding properly in tune, the BFTS might be just what the doctor ordered.

The BFTS is something that—I think—many people know about without completely understanding so feel free to shout out in the comments if you’ve questions about the system. Of course, you can also drop me a line if you’d like to arrange an appointment to discuss.

Gibson does things Gibson’s way.

Whether it makes sense or not.

Anybody who works with guitars could, most likely, give you a list of ‘quirks’ that help keep Gibson’s guitars traditional. For ‘traditional’, you can sometimes read, “stuff that doesn’t make sense but it’s the way we’ve done it for decades so we’d be mental to change”.

The saddles on the usual Les Paul bridge—the Gibson Tun-O-Matic—are individually adjustable so that each string can be tweaked to help intonate the guitar (to allow it play mostly in tune over the length of the neck). The bridge is installed at an angle to provide some extra backwards travel to get things where they need to be.

All seemingly reasonable.

There are two type of bridge generally fitted to Les Pauls (and most Gibson electrics): The ABR-1 and the Nashville. The ABR is the original and, if you’ve ever paid it any attention, you’ll probably have seen that it has the three bass-side saddles installed backwards (that is, with the sloped/angled side towards the pickups)*. If you think about it, this isn’t the best way to have a string contact a bridge—ideally, you want a clean, definite take-off point like you’d get with a straight edge, as on the treble strings.

So, why this craziness?

Basically, it’s to make up for the fact that there is insufficient travel on the ABR bridge to properly add the compensation the wound strings need. Flipping the saddles allows a little bit more compensation before the saddle can’t go any farther.

Now, to be fair, Gibson tried to address this issue (and others) with the ABR when they developed the Nashville Tune-O-Matic. And, just like when Gibson change anything, many people think that the original was best. Of course, I have an opinion on this but it’s not really the point here, so I won’t go into it. Suffice it to say, the Nashville bridge has a bit more travel for its saddles and so, it usually intonates reasonably well.

Sometimes though, it doesn’t.

Sometimes, you need to do the ABR trick and flip a saddle. Good intonation takes precedent over any drawbacks associated with the backward saddles.

Not all Nashvilles are created equal when it comes to doing this. It tends to be easy on a Gibson bridge (just back the screw out until it disengages) but some aftermarket bridges are a bit more hassle.

Incidentally, the ABR-style bridge (with the already-reversed saddles) sometimes requires one or more saddle-flips too. A lot depends on factors like string-gauge and even whether the bridge has been installed slightly out of place (it happens). Saddle-flipping on an ABR-1 is really simple—pop out the retainer wire and lift out the saddle. Easy-peasy.

Perhaps I can make this the first in a series of Things That Are A Bit Mental About Gibson Guitars.

*Incidentally, occasionally, more or less than three saddles is reversed. It depends on how the particular guitar intonates.

The title of this article reuses a—rather poor—joke that I first used on Twitter. It wasn’t that great then but, as there’s a recession, even the bad jokes have to be recycled.

Recently, I’ve spoken with a couple of people about bridge repair on acoustic guitars so I thought it might be useful to write something about what’s involved.

A ‘lifting’ bridge isn’t uncommon on an acoustic guitar, especially a steel-string. There’s a huge amount of tension on those six strings and the glue that holds the bridge to the top of the body has a lot to deal with. Sometimes, it begins to give way and one corner, or the back of the bridge, lifts a little. Maybe just a bit at first; not even enough to see. It usually doesn’t stay that way, though, and soon you can store spare picks in the gap. Next, the thing bursts free and kills a kid in the front row of your gig (and one of the spare picks blinds his granny). Embarrassing or what?

How do you avoid this?

Get it fixed, of course.

Now I know what you’re thinking but, it’s not enough to squidge a bit of glue into the gap and hope for the best. A proper fix for this means removing the bridge (after carefully softening the remaining glue), cleaning both surfaces (bridge and guitar top) and glueing it back in place.

None of this is rocket science, but it is important that each step is done right. Removing the bridge is generally done by heating the bridge to soften the glue holding it. There are other methods but they’re generally reserved for very extreme situations. Lots of the time, a heating blanket (pictured clamped to the bridge above right) will be fine but sometimes a bridge-removal iron has to be heated on a hotplate before being used to heat the bridge (again and again and again). When the glue’s softened, it loosens its grip and it’s usually possible to use spatulas and the like to work between the bridge and guitar top. It should go without saying that’s it’s very important that this is done well by someone who’s had as much experience as possible. If this is forced or rushed, it’s very possible that the freed bridge will take great hunks of the guitar top with it. That would be bad.

When the bridge is free, all of the bits of glue on it and the guitar top must be cleaned away, as must any natural oils from the bridge wood. I usually roughen up the wood on the bottom of the bridge once it’s cleaned as it gives a better surface for the glue to adhere to.

Then it needs to be glued back on. This needs a lot of care to make sure it will align properly (and stay there while the glue is drying). Sometimes I use a couple of modified bridge pins to help line things up.

Good clamping is essential and that has to be considered. In some cases—like this one—I have to make a clamping caul especially for a slightly odd shaped bridge. A caul spreads the clamping pressure and helps ensure a strong glue joint. The photo right at the start of this article shows the clamping arrangement for this bridge repair. It’s not always necessary to use so many clamps but that’s generally dictated by the particular job. It’s worth mentioning that (although not photographed) there are a number of cauls inside the guitar to protect the guitar top and to accommodate the bracing.

This sort of bridge repair for failed glue-joints is not uncommon but there’s a bit of work needed to do it properly. Personally, I’d avoid the ‘squidge-some-glue-in-the-gap-and-cross-your-fingers’ method on any guitar you feel is a keeper. It might be enough to keep a cheapie beer-session strummer going for another while but it shouldn’t be considered a sound repair on a good guitar.