Saddle Sore
From steel to titanium, all sorts of materials are used for your bridge saddles. What’s the deal? Dave burrluck investigates…
your strings are anchored by the bridge/tailpiece at one end and the tuners at the other. Between those two points are the (top) nut and saddles.
Let’s consider the saddles on a Strat. The original vintage spec bridge uses a thin rectangle of steel bent into the familiar form. It’s held in place by a small bolt threaded into the back of the bent saddle (with a tensioning spring); at its front are two height adjustment grub screws. There are no tracks for those two screws to sit in and the saddle can move sideways relatively easily despite the down-pressure of the string itself. However, they are easy to adjust for height and intonation. Later spec block saddles, either die-cast notsureium, machined from solid stock or sintered from powdered metal have all featured on Fender and numerous clones over the years.
But why would you want to mess with your Strat’s saddles? It could be that the original ones are rusted, have been changed to block-styles or the saddle height grub screws can protrude and provide a nice sharp edge for your palm muting. Then, of course, we’re led to believe saddle material will have some effect on the sound of your instrument – clearly there’s plenty of potential for a bit of sonic seasoning.
Like every other area of the guitar the danger is that we attach a sound to a common name of a material, such as steel. But steel is an alloy, which can be hardened and heat treated too.
“There is the belief that the pre-CBS [Fender] saddles were ‘hardened’,” offers Callaham, who make highly revered hardware. “Every pre-CBS saddle we have tested, only measures an average of 50 Rockwell B [scale of material hardness] and were not hardened. We choose to use a steel with a hardness of 95-98 Rockwell B for our saddles. The steel work hardens in the making of the saddle and is well over 115 Rockwell B where the string crosses.”
Glendale Guitars, another maker of high-end boutique hardware, offers a little more generalisation stating: “different saddle materials will give your guitar different tones: brass has a very nice balanced tone of highs, mids and lows. Aluminum adds highs without losing mids or lows. Cold rolled steel adds a very acoustical value to your guitar’s tone, more highs than brass but less highs than aluminum. Titanium is a very light weight and hard material: the sound is similar to brass but adds a little sparkle to the highs.”
One choice might be Tone Up saddles, sent to us by ToneTech luthier supplies in the UK and conceived by Sever Innovations in Slovenia. They don’t offer us any Rockwell information and simply state they’re made from stainless steel (an alloy of iron with a minimum of 10.5 per cent chromium plus varying amounts of things like carbon, silicon and manganese). Stainless steel is rust resistant and here it’s not only used for the saddles but the intonation and height adjustment screws and saddle tensioning springs. The saddles are available in three widths 10.4, 10.8 and 11.2mm to cover most common string spacings. Another neat feature is that the saddle height screws are designed to sit within the saddle and they ship with 6mm high screws, plus 8mm and 10mm sizes, meaning that you can cover heights from approximately 7.5mm up to 14.5mm.
They’re certainly a neat upgrade that remove those potentially sharp screws. Our only concern is that although the string slot in each saddle is extended compared to vintage spec, the string – as it passes from the top of the saddle down into the block – rests on the top edge of the slot, which might cause snagging with energetic vibrato use and affect tuning stability. We have to say though we had no problems with tuning stability (over three long gigs) once we’d done the usual string stretching.
Is there a sound difference between our Strat’s original steel saddles and these new replacements? We certainly like what we’re hearing and are inclined to say they sit between steel and titanium, giving us a very slightly fuller, less ‘hollow’ sound but it’s hard to answer the question without a lot more playing and listening time.
They’re not cheap either but if your Strat is in need of some saddle love, they’re definitely worth a try.