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Are any of you using a two-piece saddle? If so, are there any considerations to keep in mind as you're designing one? Just sketching it out on paper, it would appear that the slant would need to be more than that of a one-piece, so as to get the compensation you're looking for. Is this the case?

Anyone have pics to share?

TIA,

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Ken Mitchell
Durham, NC

Ken,

Check out this thread. It may not be exactly what you want but there is a photo. In this case it is a split saddle that can be placed in two locations based on the tuning.

http://www.luthiersforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10101&t=29072&p=387277&hilit=bridge#p387277

Philip

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aka konacat

If you think my playing is bad you should hear me sing!
Practice breeds confidence and confidence breeds competence. Unfortunately, I'm stuck in practice.

Thanks, Philip.

In the meantime, I've gotten some confirmation of my thinking by looking at Lowden guitars. He does a split saddle on some models. It looks like the angle is slightly increased, which matches my sketches of the break points, and where I think the saddle pieces need to sit. I'm going to keep experimenting.

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Ken Mitchell
Durham, NC

I am sure you are aware that an under saddle transducer is not possible with a split saddle. K&K and other soundboard transducers would work fine with your split saddle, but USTs are good to have in the arsenal of acoustic guitar amplification schemes since they work very well in a high volume setting, like a typical club. Soundboard transducers are great for solo guitar in a coffee house setting, but they feedback dramatically once the volume goes up and other instruments like drums and bass are added to the mix.

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Stay with the happy people.
--Reynolds Large

Fishman used to offer a split saddle transducer (that fit Lowdens and perhaps others) for their Matrix pickups. Have they stopped? Also, with a little ingenuity, a flexible UST can sometimes be threaded through both slots by dropping it beneath the bridge plate between the slots.

Fishman offers 1/8" and a 3/32" straight saddle USTs for the Matrix Infinity. The Matrix USTs are fairly rigid and are quite different from the braided metal versions seen with Baggs and lower priced Fishman series. It is an interesting idea to try to thread a braided UST through the 2 saddle slots of a split saddle bridge. I would think it extremely difficult to guarantee uniform output from all the strings. Many braided USTs are dead for the first 1/2" or so from the end and require an extra hole drilled into the saddle slot in which to feed the dead part of the UST. Couple this this with the extra length required to jump between the saddle slots and I think it very likely you will run out of live area of the braided UST.
Plus, I am not a huge fan of the braided metal USTs. They sound very brittle to me. Fishman supplies the braided USTs for low priced, off-shore guitars and uses a different UST for the Matrix Infinity, which is the least brittle sounding UST system I have heard.

_________________
Stay with the happy people.
--Reynolds Large

From Fishman's webpage about the matrix pickup: "Also available in split saddle format (PRO-MAL-INF)"

There are other UST designs besides the matrix style and braided styles. B-band for instance is nothing like either.

And you may want to take a look at this offering from Highlander found on the Lowden website:

http://www.georgelowden.com/page5/page3 ... index.html