Ashtray Bridge Assemblies - 6 Steel Saddles vs. 3 Brass Saddles

You have the worst designed and poorer sounding bridge ever.
Replacing with a three saddle one will be a big improvement .
If you want the advantage of better intonation the time proven Gotoh "modern" bridge is another great option,and my personal preference.

 

I personally thought the six saddle looked nice at first, but what makes the three saddle so good?

 

Now, I'm speaking just of the 6 "hammer" saddle, vintage style bridge here, but the string falls over the barrel off to one side, and therefore the saddle height screw on the other side sees little or no load, and this screw migrates up or down, often just gets lost, and the unbalanced saddles start tipping over and they're all leaning on one another. The darned, rattly thing simply dis-assembles itself as you play the guitar.

Apparently some guys have a very delicate or deliberate way of playing and they somehow don't disturb the Jenga Tower. I can't accomplish this - I can barely visualize it, mentally.

I see this image and I see 12 razor blades, waiting to maim me. There's a G + L version, precision made with brass saddles, that works much less horribly, but you can't simply transplant that bridge onto a Fender necked guitar - trust me, it doesn't work, mainly because the heel on the FMIC product and copies of it are more narrow.

 

It is a bad design, and it is poorly executed as well. Among other things, it imposes a width array at the saddles that's really too wide for the guitar. If the saddles were brass, and the overall length of each barrel was 5-10% shorter, the saddle IMO could sit more squarely under the load from the string above. Perhaps another partial solution would be a wider neck that's 1.85 inches wide at the nut, or thereabouts. But as stock, the barrels are trying to impose a wider string array than the rest of the guitar is calling for.

I dislike the look of it, and dislike the way it keeps coming apart so readily. I find it odd, trying to play a Telecaster with the strings this far apart as the two outboard strings are then falling off the edges of the fretboard, above say the 9th fret.

But the actual sound, if you have tamed the rattles for the moment, isn't actually that bad. The extra parts probably impart some trashy or rattly sounds, but to me that's far from my central complaint about it.

 

+1, https://www.stewmac.com/parts-and-h...-XblaSMU3qm4Y_ij3w8DqFWj4zCJiD08aAjxGEALw_wcB

 

Never mind

 

Of course you can.

As far as intonation with three saddle goes it's not really a problem , perfect intonation is impossible anyway in a guitar no matter what the bridge is,but even if you can hear the three saddle intonation "problem" there are compensated saddles that tackle it.

 

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da twang babay

 

I couldn't remove the 6-saddle rattle hammer bridge fast enough from my James Burton Standard. A 3-saddle bridge assembly may be a contributor to twang and classic Tele sound. Intonation is good enough and if you want better, there are compensated saddles available for cheap. Setting the string radius is a non-issue. Set the action of each string where it needs to be: the result never forms a single radius.

 

+1. I did the same on my Albert Collins, and never looked back

 

As for your question about tone, I have three Teles each with six saddles similar to the Strat (not the "hammer" style), and they all sound like Teles.

 

My '94 MIM Tele had the worst of all possible worlds -- 6-saddle bridge *and* it's a top-loader, so even less down-force to hold all those saddles in place. My dad and I drilled new holes to install 3 compensated saddles and that helped a lot.

 

I got one of the Fender Six Saddle Bridge assemblies with a 52 AVRI I purchased early 2012. Fender provided it in case the buyer preferred a modern six saddle bridge assembly. Well, I put it on and took it right off after I found that I couldn't adjust the string action/radius without having any of (all 12) grub screws tearing into my hand.

I tried to sell the assembly on various sites over a period of several years and finally (with no takers) included it as a freebee as part of a package deal on several other parts.

Not recommended!

 

I have a 2017 USA-made American Special Telecaster with the vintage 3-saddle bridge. It will not perfectly intonate at the 12th fret. I have a set of brass Gotoh In-Tune Compensated Saddles on the way from StewMac. I'm going to give them a try.

 

I bought a 1973 a few years ago. It came to me with a six saddle bridge. I expected to replace them, as I have compensated three-barrel brass saddles on all of my other Teles.

I thought I'd live with it for a while first, and I'm glad I did. I don't want to say that those problems don't exist, but I haven't had any of the problems listed above.

This is staying on this guitar.

 

Well, I guess I’m in a severe minority and/or I’m the most fortunate person on earth.

I kept the stock bridge on my 1995 MIM Tele Special, and I have not one single complaint about it.

Sounds good, is structurally sound (nary a single rattle, ever), intimates well and looks good (not as good/cool as a three-saddle, but still good).

If it doesn’t work for you, replace it...but don’t replace it because somebody else said it’s bad.