LOL. I know you can get the Ti bolt for 9. By pricing it at 80 I was making it as equally ridiculous as the bone saddle thingies. But...(<--<< There it is a again!) I have 2 ES 335s same pickups same hardware same electronics same strings same setup same me playing them They sound very different from each other. One is all warm and round. The other is a screamer. Different trees. Maybe the bone saddle thingies would make a huge difference?
Won a lot of races with a steel frame, record-equipped, totally titanium-free bicycle. Head-down, 140rpm sprint in a 96-inch gear -- ain't thinking about no bolts.
My only real concern is that I'd think the threads could strip out more easily in bone saddles than either metal or Tusq saddles. But, maybe it's not an issue.
China White? what???? Brass seems nice....perhaps T-1 AL. or Rhodium, YES RHODIUM --- everyone knows it is the BEST tone improvement a guitar can have.
Just because someone makes it, and someone else will buy it. Doesn't exactly create a demand. But it WAS endorsed by some semi obscure book author... Not a player, or builder or engineer. I'm not drinking that coolaid.
I think the important question here is, why did gibson stop using bone almost immediately and why did they never convert the whole production line to it? I'd guess it's for the same reason they started replacing last years brass adjustable nuts with titanium so fast.
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That "obscure book author" was is the not so obscure A. R. Duchossoir. I'm curious about the reason Gibson initially went to them, as we know, from history, why they drop things...Cost...
i've had the opportunity to play several instruments identical except for color & one always stands out above the rest...
No, he's no Stephen King, Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, or Louis L'Amour so he's an obscure niche writer who hasn't written a book in decades. You wanna tilt at windmills go ahead, but that's all you. The consensus seems to be that it's a ridiculous waste of money.
I agree the price looks high but the question was: will it make a difference in tone? My experience is yes it will. Not a huge one but one you can hear. I am basing this on my experience switching to nylon saddles and later a bone nut. Both changes made a difference (not better necessarily but clearly different) so it stands to reason the bone saddles would provide some change in tone.
I agree....i'm not advocating rushing out and buying them, but I think they must alter tone to some degree. I saw a genuine, documented and signed Angus Young signature SG last night that was factory equipped with nylon saddles....
So just to tie this together with your other thread re: the Faded - that is why I switched to Nylon. I thought my leads sounded too bright on the bridge pick up. They actually sounded okay on recordings - just not what I wanted live. I ended up just changing the bottom three saddles for a total cost of like $6. I think Shardy tried this too and had some luck. Maybe this could work for you?
I've thought about that too....and I might switch at some point...but im really looking forward to getting a potted pickup in there with the covers on them....im probably crazy, but I think the open bobbin 490 pickups, which are super tilted without a trim ring, have a big change in tone compared to a cover that is squared up to the strings...
No I don't think you are crazy. I have noticed different sounds from tilted pickups and even tilted one or two on purpose. As for the covers, again not crazy. There is an interview with Seth Lover out there somewhere where he says the covers are there to mellow out the highs.
The preferred ETSG approved method of squaring up your pickups with the strings is to cut out a couple of pieces of moderately stiff packing foam... about 2" wide and for the neck: about 20mm tall. for the bridge: about 25mm tall The height is what tilts the pickup, so adjust it depending on how stiff the foam is. You do this at string change time, and do some other maintenance at the same time, such as cleaning/oiling your fretboard, installing knob pointers etc. You have to remove the bridge to get the pickguard off, so I usually measure in mm the height of the bridge post wheels so i can get her back close to where she was quickly. Insert the foam under the rear of each p'up, and then put everything back together and re-check your intonation and bridge height action. Apparently, not all pickups seem to benefit from being parallel to the strings, but Gibson 490s do. Adding pickup rings to a guitar with a large pick guard will forever brand you as a "Belt AND Suspenders man" ... *laughs. I've done it too. I found out too late that the regular pickup rings won't fit when you have a pick guard under them. Learn by doing, eh? So the foam pieces described above are actually a better solution. Here you can see that my neck pickup has a flat (non angled) surround because this is the only thing that would fit under the strings. It's possible that my custom pickguard is too thick to use rings... but really, no pickguard is designed to use rings except the small one. So I'm using the approved foam piece under the rear of the neck p'up, and the ring is only there because I already drilled the holes before I realized that the idea wouldn't work. If you look closely, you can also see that my bridge p'up has a neck p'up angled ring, plus a flat non-angled ring stacked on it... because the regular bridge p'up angled ring would also not fit. In spite of how makeshift this looks, it actually works perfectly now, and nobody usually notices because they're knocked out by the tone of my '57 classics and by the looks of my walnut pickguard. Once you get the foam measured right, it's done. One of our members made his own out of maple, and glued it in place.
