Dr Tony Balls wrote: ↑Wed Aug 03, 2022 5:47 am
You forgot this metric:
ACTUALLY HAS SIX SADDLES----------------------------------------------------------------------ONLY HAS THREE -----------------------in the bin
Staytrem - - Mustang - - OG JM Bridge - - TOM - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Mastery- - - - - - - - - - - - -
Been a while since I've said this, but the number of saddles that a guitar needs is one, or any string instrument, for that matter. If you don't believe me, ask just almost any acoustic guitar, any classical guitar, banjo, cello, violin, viola, sitar, balalaika, bouzouki, I could go on and on.
The reason electric guitars have multiple saddles (and the Mastery actually has two, not three) is for the benefit of the guitar maker, who can use the adjustable saddles to cover up quite a lot of slop on the guitar, especially bridge placement and neck angle.
But quality acoustic guitar makers simply get the bridge in the right spot and with the right saddle for intonation, because they know that adjustable saddles are of no benefit to the actual sound of the guitar, and it's not like
some idiots haven't tried.
From the viewpoint of sound, the less saddles the better, two is better then three, three is better than six, one is best of all. This of course assumes that one has a guitar that is well made and doesn't need any corrective action at the saddle, and that one has a saddle that has been cut to compensate for the different string thicknesses, and that the saddle compensation is in agreement with whether or
not one is using a wound or unwound G string.
In short, if anyone thinks the Mastery bridge is somehow less accurate than something with six saddles
when using the string set it's designed to work with (unwound G), well, it's not. It sounds a lot better, also.
Here you go, I'll add to my response. This is the typical saddle positions on a guitar for wound vs unwound G, your guitar's saddles are probably arranged like this (there can be exceptions):
And I'm going to quote from
this Quora answer here to help folks understand.
The reason guitar saddles have to be intonated is because the effective vibrating length of a string is shorter than its actual length. The two ends of the string are held fast in the nut and saddle slots and the very ends of the string are kept from vibrating.
If you think of each end of the string as a sort of pendulum, it’s like it was held rigidly in a vise rather than in a pivot. If the string were infinitely flexible, this wouldn’t be an issue, but because it resists flexing, its effective pivot points are not exactly where the string crosses the nut and the saddle, shortening the part of the string that oscillates to produce a tone a bit and making its pitch higher than what we want for that oscillating length. So we adjust that frequency lower by lengthening the string at the saddle.
It’s the nature of steel wire that a thicker wire is stiffer than a thinner wire. It follows, therefore, that we need to lengthen a thicker string more than a thinner string. On an intonated saddle, the low E string’s length is adjusted to be longer than the A string, which in turn is longer than the D string.
When we get to the G string, electric and acoustic guitars diverge. Acoustics usually use a wound G string while electrics use a plain G string. When you look at an acoustic bridge (top image - wound G), the G string is shorter than the D string, but on an electric bridge (bottom image - unwound G) it’s longer than the D string.
If you replace the whole set of strings with a lighter or heavier set, the intonation will change a tiny bit, but it will almost never need an adjustment because the relative stiffnesses of the strings in the set will be about the same. If you change one string in a set with a lighter or heavier one, that particular string will have a little less perfect intonation than the others.
So you see that it's not some peculiar facet of your guitar that needs intonation (for the most part), it's the relative stiffness of the strings, which is a known factor and can be, uh,
compensated for, literally.
And you can see in that image above that the Mastery bridge will conform quite well to the needs of string sets with an unwound G, it won't do wound very well, but I guess they feel that accommodating the relative few electric guitarists that use wound G strings wasn't worth it.
You know what did not do well? The first Telecaster bridges, which had three saddles, but none of the saddles were compensated, so two strings had to share the same vibrating length as the other, meaning one but not both could be in perfect position. So, if Fender would have done a single saddle with the compensation you see built into it above, it would have been better. The adjustable saddles were in fact a detriment here and the guitar could never have good intonation.