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I've read the material (tusq, bone, fossolized ivory, etc) nuts, saddles and even bridge pins are made from affect tone. What do you guys think? Is that bollox or actually true? I have lots of corian laying around but will I get better tone if I use something else?

100% yes materials affect tone.
but who's to say corian isn't the tone your looking for.
hears a good experiment, get some plastic bridge pins, string up the guitar then play it for awile. then switch them out with wood, then bone. you'll hear the difference.
if you do some experimenting with corian, let me know what you think of it.

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I would say most definately yes.Some people prefer wood pins over bone,but most will agree bone is best for nuts and saddles,when considering the cost.I myself prefer bone pins also.I`ve done quite a bit of business here in Nashville changing out nuts saddles and pins to bone for many very fine players.In fact it`s amazing to me how many higher end guitars folks have brought in that don`t have these quality components.For example a player came to the shop yesterday and needed a fret dress,and he had a really nice old Guild that had a bone nut,a bone saddle,which many don`t,but then it had plastic pins with fake abalone dots.When I pointed this out to him,he immediately asked me to change the pins to bone.I personally don`t think the pins have as much affect on sound as the saddle,but I do think it has some.Anyway,why not use quality components on a quality guitar? By the way ,LMI has a very good price on nice 3 degree bone pins.There slotted,but I just turn them around,which was suggested to me by David Collins.
James

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James W Bolan
Nashville Tennessee

What about wooden ones? I have a really scrap 80 buck classical guitar, a "camping" guitar... And I change the plastique nut for a Cocobolo one that i made... really changed the sound... But can wood nuts and saddles could be good on decent guitars?

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Francis Richer, Montréal
Les Guitares F&M Guitars

The number of people who swear many things make a huge and noticible difference in tone is much larger than the number who'd bet money on being able to hear it blindfolded.

I'd say a bone nut probably makes a positive difference VS soft plastic, as it's always contacting the vibrating string, but I'm going to have to find one of that second group before I'll believe a lot of other claims.

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Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services

Seriously?!? All of those components ABSOLUTELY affect tone. The extent to which the affect the tone is what you should be asking. Changing the saddle material has had a noticeable difference in 100% of the guitars I have modified. A nut should only make a difference on open strings but believe it or not, I have switched bone pins for rosewood pins in a few cases to smooth the sound out a bit.

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Its an interesting considering.

My mentor tells me absolutely everything affects tone. So why any different for the pins.

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I qualified it with the word 'noticible' for that reason. There's a large difference between a meaningful change being perceived and that change being real. The extent to which people are certain of their senses changes really quickly when money and two blindfolds are involved.

I can tell the difference between Pepsi and Coke, and I'm so certain of it that I'd go 10:1 odds in a double-blind (ie: I put down $1000 if I lose, and I get $100 if I win). If anyone is that certain about the effect of bridge pin material, I'll be at the Montreal Guitar Show next year with $50 and some blindfolds (I figure if I win then my trip was free, and if I lose then I learned something worth $50 )

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Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services

I'm in the camp that everything affects tone ......but can you detect it....? Bob ,think that may be a safe bet. Think you would just about break even.

I think you're looking at it the wrong way. I agree that you'd never find someone who's able to pick out the bone bridge pins vs. the wood ones in a double blind test but, I'll bet you a lot of people could tell the difference between the same guitar with wood pins vs. bone pins. i.e. if you were able to change pins on the same guitar within say 10 sec. many people would be able to tell if you changed the pins or not between playing sessions. Perhaps a recording would be the best way to test because it takes so long to change the pins.

Something as simple as putting your finger on the bridge changes tone subtly but noticeably. I doubt you'd find anyone who could correctly identify the finger on the bridge in a double blind either but that doesn't mean the effect isn't there, it just means that the nature of the effect is strong enough to identify in a qualitative manner but not a quantitative manner.

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Most people hear what they are conditioned and expect to hear. Any change in weight of components involved in the bridge area will cause change.

I think the best change one can make in the bridge area is to go to unslotted bridge pins. I was turned on to doing this by Dave Collins at the Ann Arbor gathering last year, I actually went home and did one guitar that evening and my others within a couple days. The slots cut in the guitar put the string ball ends more directly in contact with the bridge plate instead of pushing against the bridge pin slots, the ball ends will bend the plastic bridge pins that come with most factory guitars after a few years and allow the ball ends to start tearing up the holes in the bridge plate. Dave has a great show and tell board with destroyed bridge plates and bent pins.

Fred

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Fred Tellier
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That is a really good idea. Someone should switch out saddle and pins and record the guitar before and after. It would be very interested to hear how different they sound.

It all boils down to efficiency of energy transfer. A good dense piece of bone with no fractures of fishers is a great nut/saddle and pin system. Many man made like Tusq, micarta, corian and a few others work well. But after using them all plus three pounds of FWI up now I have to say bone is my best choice. Good bone seems to me to be just as efficient and a lot less trouble to shape than FWI. I have no issue with Hardwood pins but would not use hardwood for a steel string nut or saddle use to the change in dimension under varying humidity.

I made these recordings in april of 06. I used a 2003 J-45 for the recordings. I swapped out a fossilized mammoth ivory saddle and a tusq saddle and played the same bits. I didn't do anything fancy. I just brought the levels up and hit record then swapped saddles and played the same thing without changing any settings. I recorded using a condensor mic and the factory pickup. I had to use the tusq to set the levels because when I started with the mammoth the tusq was just a bit too hot at the same level with the pickup and I had to start over. I made mp3's of the mic alone and the pickup alone. You can have a listen and make your own conclusions if you like.

Mic'd- http://www.soundclick.com/util/getplaye ... 78527&q=hi

Pickup- http://www.soundclick.com/util/getplaye ... 78539&q=hi

There's certainly a difference but it's hard to tell if it's just levels or a real tonal change. I think I like the tusq better than the mammoth but I'd have to listen a few more times to be sure. Part of me thinks that you should re-do the files with the recordings normalized so that the levels are the same so that you could focus on tone rather than volume.

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Well when I recorded them I didnt change levels at all. I just quickly loosened the strings made the swap and hit the record button again. The volume difference is part of the difference between the two. The tusq sounds louder because it is louder in both the mic'd and pickup recordings.

I made the recordings because I could hear the difference right away when I swapped my saddle but a couple of expert luthiers said it was nonsense and rubbish. So after a couple of days of many swaps I recorded both. I found this site a few months ago and I just remembered my experiment and thought I'd ask you folks what you thought.

This is a real can of worms. A lot of this stuff _should_ make a difference, and much of it should not. You might be hard pressed to _measure_ anything either way, or come up with results that everybody would accept in real double blind tests. People do hear what they expect to hear all too often.

I could see the nut material effecting the tone of open strings. How could it possibly effect the tone of fretted ones?

There can be a significant difference in weight between different bridge pins. Bone pins weigh about three grams more for a set than plastic ones, iirc, and that can be enough to effect the tone of a guitar. Other than that the problem is in figuring out _why_ to pins that weigh the same would sound different. I don't subscribe to the school of thought that says the pins transfer energy to the top: if the string is vibrating behind the saddle that's a problem, in my estimation. I'd be a lot more willing to accept such claims if folks could come up with measurements of some force signal between the pin, or the ball end of the string, and the bridge.

IMO, a softer saddle material would be most likely to filter out some of the high frequencies, and effect the sound that way. A couple of years ago I made a brief attemt to measure this, swapping a saddle of HDPE in for a bone one, and measuring the sound of plucked strings. I couldn't find anything with the setup I had at that time, although you could hear a difference. Maybe now that I've got a better setup I could actually measure something, but it will take a fair amount of time.

I hate to say it, but playing tests are pretty unreliable. For one thing, just the act of removing and replacing the strings can effect the way they work: it knocks crud out from between the windings, and that changes the overtones. Best bet there would be to set up with a brand new set of strings, play them for just a little while, and do the swap: they probably won't get too dirty in the process. If you could swap back and forth a few times that would help.

Against all of this rational negativism we do have to set the force of majority opinion: most people do believe these things matter. I'm sure any of us can think of things that most people believe that are not true, and the interesting thing is that some of the things I disbelieve are ones that some of you believe (which is why I'm not giving examples).

In short, this is one of those questions that is unlikely to ever be 'settled' even by reams of evidence. Once a belief gets entrenched no amount of reason will overthrow it, as has been shown again and again in the realm of 'junk science'.

All I know is that several players have come into my shop wanting bone nuts ,saddles ,and pins after hearing a guitar that I have changed these components on.These are quality players,and they must feel that they are making an improvement.
james

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James W Bolan
Nashville Tennessee

It has been my experience that for most players, i.e. non-builders, the most visual changes affect the tone the most. Whereas most builders know that it's the things you don't see that affect the tone the most. Thus, a lot of players hear with their eyes.

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Randy Muth
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Well now Sin

I've hear tell that corian laying around gets better with age...so me suggest you just let it age longer, in the meantime bone works real gooder me here tell.

Now regarding bollox...and other stuff like the tooth fairy...people are willing to pay their hard earned money for something to believe in.

Yup ...lotta dudes lay down hard cash just to know what they supposto think. Can you imagine that?


Blessings
the
Padma



blessings
the
Padma

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My own experience is that switching around nuts and saddles does seem to make a difference in the sound of the Guitar...

How much of that difference is caused by different string height and spacing profiles and how much of that difference is purely the material is an important question, though... I have found that you can make slight EQ type changes to the guitar's sound by string height profile and spacing changes.... so this may be some of it.

Put me down in the "Bad luck with soft gooey plastic saddles and nuts" camp too... I hate those things...

But... say you were able to get 2-CNC'ed sets of nuts and saddles... 1 made of Tusq and the 2nd made of high quality bleached bone... Both cut the same within 0.001"... Would you still hear a difference?

Thanks

John

John wrote:
"But... say you were able to get 2-CNC'ed sets of nuts and saddles... 1 made of Tusq and the 2nd made of high quality bleached bone... Both cut the same within 0.001"... Would you still hear a difference?"

That's the $64 question, and one that will be very hard to settle.

The problem is that it's very difficult to find, or make, 'identical' guitars, and most people's ability to remember tone is far worse than they think it is. Basically, to really get reproducible results in a listening test, you have to present the A and B sounds within about 15 seconds of each other, and have little, or no, noise in between. It's just not possible to swap saddles silently in 15 seconds, so that leaves you looking for two 'identical' guitars, if you want to do a live test. Good luck. Most people are rightly skeptical of recorded sounds: although a properly done test of that sort is realitvely easy to do, you have to accept the results with some reservations.

This is the sort of problem that plagues all of instrument acoustic research.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

I for one like the look of a bone nut, saddle and wooden pins.

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Michael Lloyd

“I was born to ignorance, yes, and lesser poverties ...
I was born to privilege that I did not see ... I didn’t know it, but my way was paved” – John Gorka

Sounds to me like I'll have it 1/32 solved for every extra large tea I skip in the next month

My thinking on saddles and bridge pins is that, given a 'detuner-retuner' setup (sort of like an external robo-guitar) one could switch them out pretty quick. Such a product exists, actually. Switching back and forth (or not!) between the two a number of times should account for any changes due to the process of changing saddles itself.

Besides that, it's all standard double-blind experiment design.

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Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services

Back when I was really trying to get the hang of setups, I did a bunch of experiments with Saddle profiles.. I fooled around with a bunch of string profiles, heights, etc... I then conducted my "Experiment" with my musician brother... Swapping in saddle after saddle that I had made in different string profiles and heights. He was amazed that such small changes to the Saddle profile could have such large changes in the sound and balance of a Guitar.... It was almost as strong as the effect of changing strings or picks.

My suspicion is that would see the variation in shaping the nut/saddle has more effect than the pure material itself between 2 fairly similar materials like Bone and Tusq or between Cow and Camel bone or whatever....

Thanks

John