• Making A Violin Nut

Just tried replacing the urea nut and saddle on my new Yamaha GC12 Classical. First fit a Tusq saddle and nut and the sound was better with the urea to my ears. Then switched to bone and the improvement was far better than either the urea or Tusq. To my ears at least, the bone nut and saddle when fit properly improve sound dramatically. I say when fit properly and mean that the saddle height, length and thickness have to be set up properly (using string height at the twelfth fret and compensation, if any, and the string heights above the first fret when fingering between the 2nd and 3rd fret should be done to spec for the guitar which involves adjusting the height of the nut and/or the depth of individual string slots. The saddle should fit snugly but not tightly in the bridge and the underside of the saddle should be flush to the bottom of the bridge slot. If either is not accomplished you will lose sound.

The saddle of a violin, for example, is the piece at the upper corner edge of the top. Saddles are usually made of bone, ivory, or a synthetic material, such as Micarta. The neck, nut and frets are fixed in their locations, which have been. Because it doesn't have good support for the string tension, this bridge is more. There are lubrications that we can use, but it's nice if the material has some built in natural lubrication. Bone does have some oils in it. Metal on metal as you will have with a brass nut, is similar to what goes on in your car, except that you don't have an oil pump to keep things slippery.

The nut string slots also should not bind. Please don't anyone mention bridge pins.Classical guitars don't have them anyway. First, a couple of MY observations.

I use bone for everything I do - it is easy to work with, looks good and the cost is right. For ethical reasons I would never use ivory of any kind, regardless of how long its been dead. Tusq is a man made material that is supposed to duplicate ivory's hardness - the big advantage for guitar makers like Taylor is that it can be molded and cnc milled to shape. I have no idea what urea is and I've never tried any of the other popular materials - graphite, soft plastic, various woods (except on my resonators), brass, aluminum, yadda yadda.I did a long time ago change the Tusq saddle in my Taylor 314 to bone - my ears weren't good enough to tell any difference.I'm also one of those people who believe that every part of a guitar has some effect on its tone - many of these are so small as to be insignificant. I'll accept the argument that once you fret a string the nut is out of the picture (but of course any change in headstock mass surely has an effect, so maybe it isn't).OK, so there have been attempts to demonstrate the differences between materials (a long time ago I thought I was smart enough to do it). Here is a very good discussion of different nut and saddle materials - play the video in the first post and make your mind up before reading any of the others.Then read discussion by Alan Carruth and David Collins and other who have really made a huge effort to study and analyze things that affect guitar sounds - Carruth is legendary in this area.

Read very carefully what they say about human hearing and our ability to 'remember' sounds and the flaws of this experiment.I'll stick with plain old cow bone, thank you. Urea is a resin material (not plastic urea formaldehyde) that is artificially made that Yamaha uses on it's classical guitars that they claim has great sound characteristics. It's pretty good, but they still use bone in their most expensive classicals. I'm with Freeman in that bone is the best.

Cowbone is what I just put in. As long as it's from a reputable place like colosi or LMI you will get good quality bone without soft spots. Even Colosi says there is no sound difference between bone varieties, but if you bleach bone it can weaken it. There are so many variables in sound on a guitar. I'm sure certain construction will respond differently to types of saddle materials. I stressed the forming of the saddle because if it doesn't make full contact in the bridge saddle slot it's not gonna sound right.

I've also heard arguments about bone nuts not effecting the sound greatly. That's true, but I'd rather have the two materials match.

Making A Violin Nut

Obsessive compulsive!