Brass saddles?

Hey there,

I've often wondered this.

Brass is a soft metal and yet folks use brass for saddles, myself included. If it's soft then won't it absorb some vibrations and decrease sustain?

Cymbals, some of the cheaper ones are more brass then the best ones which are more bronze.

Using that thought pattern wouldn't it make sense to make bridge saddles from......... bronze?

Has anybody tried this?

Bronze is a musical metal, just ask Zildjian, Sabian, Piaste etc etc etc. There is a bunch of study on bronze from the cymbals folks. You have cast bronze vs rolled bronze and they even tweal the formular with different amounts of tin etc.

Gary

Brass is soft, but dense.

We use a lot of bronze alloys in the mining industry as bushings and spacers. They are pretty tough and hard to work with, as well as expensive.

higher quality banjos usually have bell cast bronze tone rings.

Manufacturers like Marc Rutters, Glendale, and Callaham use higher quality brass with less lead.

Quite often, especially where small parts are concerened, brass is used because of superior machinability. "Yellow Brass" is considered the benchmark. On the machinability scale (there really is one) YB is rated as 100 and everything else something lower. Bronze and some brass are considered to be some of the best metals for fine detail casting.

So... it works roughly like this: Someone chooses brass or bronze for its manufacturability... and THEN the sonic properties are invented. Brass or bronze would be kinder to the strings anyway... good for friction applications.

The density and hardness of a metal often has little to do with its acoustic properties e.g. aluminium, a soft and light metal can result in a bright and brittle sounding bridge. Aluminium is more difficult to machine cleanly than brass and steel, brass is easy to turn and cut. These metals do change the sound of the bridge, use ears.

Well that shoots down my asking Zildjian for some bronze slugs to try my theory out on.

Gary

Well that shoots down my asking Zildjian for some bronze slugs to try my theory out on.

Gary

You could just order some 3/8" bronze and brass alloy rods. Would be a lot easier to make the saddles from that.

I think you will find that higher quality alloys will probably sound more articulate than lower quality alloys or pot metals.