Bridge and Saddle Replacement                                                                         Electric and Acoustic Guitar and Bass

The bridge is the wooden part on an acoustic where the pins go in. The saddle is the long bone/TUSQ/Plastic (ugh) piece that contacts the strings, and the profile and height are critical to string action/feel. On an electric, the bridge is usually metal, rests on the guitar body, and the saddles contact the strings. Upgrading an old or cheapie electric bridge transforms a guitar. You’ll get wonderful intonation, string spacing, string radius, smooth adjustability, not to mention tonal bliss. Almost every acoustic guitar needs saddle lowering/shaping/sanding or replacement, and you need the right saddle material for the guitar. Did you know that beautiful, expensive organic bone saddles don’t always work with certain pickup systems? I do. Or that the bottom profile of a saddle shouldn’t always be square. What? I see a LOT of well-intentioned DIY jobs on saddles that are killing the action, tone and break angle of strings. Please enjoy the video below, complete with subtitles.

   Fretwork

Fretwork is the bread and butter of a good repair shop. Big stores charge $350 for a PLEK (CNC laser job) and setup (and months of wait time), or $300 for a hand-job (what?) and YOU supply the strings. Ouch.

It takes expensive tools, time and a LOT of experience to do correctly, removing just a whisper of material. Nearly every guitar, new or old, has some form of fretwork to be done. Minor spot-leveling is included in my Full Setup package. Usually, that’s 2 or 3 outlier high spots that need to be tamed and crowned. Beyond that, we’re into more complex fretwork. High frets are identified by using a Fret Rocker, and sharpie run along the offending areas. Then, I’ll either file with a 3-corner dressing file, or if it’s really wonky in several places (like loose teeth on a redneck), I use radiused blocks with 400 grit 3M Gold stickit paper and remove only the bare minimum of material. Once the fret tops are even and radiused, I crown and do a 9 step hand polish using Micro-Mesh 1200 to 12000 grit pads. BLING! Smoother than my dance moves. Like, way smoother. For ouchy frets ends (worse in the wintertime…I do a lot of them January-March), you need a fret edge dress. It’s a long process, because I use a tiny diamond-grit file, not a horrible sanding block. Pro Tip: don’t use spring-loaded capos. The excessive clamping force can leave deep divots in frets 1 to 5, typically the plain B and high E strings. 

Nut Replacement

Insert Nut joke here. I’ll wait. Done? You sure? So immature.

Okay, I’m throwing the gauntlet here. 90% of guitars have improper nut values. Yes, I’m talking to YOU, Dear Reader. Even brand new $$$ name-brand ones. Slap a capo on a $4,000 guitar in a showroom, and enjoy the sharp intonation and need to re-tune. How dare they? Don’t they know who I AM, and what I PAID? Yes, they do. 

Here goes: Guitars are shipped worldwide, and have to have generous (high) nut and saddle values to account for local humidity and temperature conditions. It’s like the driver’s seat button in your car; it’s there, but you have to adjust it to your anatomy after the 6’7″ mechanic hops out. This makes a huge difference in playability, tuning stability, tone, intonation up the neck, string-binding, allowing strings to ring freely, and eliminating annoying open-string buzz. Minor nut slotting (for string height and free movement) is included in the Setup package, but a full nut replacement is all about precision tools and experience. It’s very easy to “ruin” a nut setup. Premade TUSQ nuts are not “drop-in” solutions: they are model-specific with pre-shaped top profiles, but are purposely oversized, and have to be filed, sanded, slotted and mated. I’ll typically wear out a set of strings (hopefully, your old ones), because I have to tune up and down a dozen times to measure everything under tension, remove it, sand/file/slot/curse, tune up, replace the snapped G string…you get the picture. I have a large inventory of nuts and saddles, TUSQ and bone. BTW, music stores usually offer a “free setup” on new instruments, so you can start there. The results are adorable. You’ll be calling me soon afterward    ;   )

Electronics

Repair – Replacements – Upgrades – Pick-Ups – Endpin Jacks – Pots – Noise Shielding

Acoustic Pickup Systems

Baggs Anthem – K and K – Fishman – Budget Pickups – Piezo – Soundhole – Microphone

Structural Repairs

All structural repairs are billed at the bench rate of $99 per hour. Guitars are like onions…they can be straightforward, or multiple layers of awful that make you cry. For example, a lifting bridge or huge bellying on an acoustic may be symptomatic of popped/cracked braces underneath. So, now we have to glue/clamp/replace the brace(s) before tackling the removal/cleanup and re-gluing of the bridge itself. Onions…so many layers, and each layer is time and more tears.