Many years ago, I remember finding out that Gibson used nylon for its top nuts and thinking, ‘Hang on, that’s not going to work.’ But, of course, so long as you use the right blend – not an easy material to work with compared with bone – it certainly does. I inherited a friend’s Ibanez semi that had a TonePros tune-o-matic with nylon saddles and, again, the guitar sounds really good and I have no plans to change it. But materials that have direct contact with the string, not least the bridge saddle, are central to the whole way a guitar works in its seemingly simple but actually rather complex manner – and that goes for whether they might be regular or more unusual materials.
Today’s thinking? Well, for electric guitars’ bridges and saddles, steel and brass are kings and there are plenty of other options: harder and brighter-sounding materials such as stainless steel or tungsten, for example, or softer metals like aluminium, not to mention modern synthetics including that aforementioned nylon or Graph Tech’s proprietary material it uses
