View Poll Results: What type of Nut Material?
- Voters
- 107. You may not vote on this poll
-
Bone
64 59.81% -
Tusq
25 23.36% -
Graphite
3 2.80% -
Plastic
4 3.74% -
Brass, Aluminium
4 3.74% -
Other
7 6.54%
-
thank you. Much needed to start the weekend.
Originally Posted by TruthHertz
-
09-25-2015 09:02 AM
-
-
The nut on my J-bass broke shortly after I bought it, so I replaced it with a TUSQ nut. I don't know that it made a ton of difference to the sound, but it's solid and pretty easy to work with.
All my other guitars still have the original nuts.
I used to have a strat with an LSR roller nut. It played nicely, but I never could get used to the feel of it when playing in first position.
-
My new Ibanez GB10SE has a half bone half brass nut. Hope I never have to replace it. I like the LSR nut on my Strat. Bone on everything else.
-
The nut affects the tone only for open strings, and i don't play many open notes. Bone is cheap, durable, easy to work, and looks good. All you really need is something that keeps the strings in the proper place and height, the rest is just looks. Shaping and working a brass nut is much more difficult than bone, so I don't bother, I just get a bone blank from StewMac and make my own when I need one. If you're going to pay someone to do it, I would expect the price for brass to be a good bit higher than bone, because of the price of the materials and the increase in labor cost due to it taking longer. The others are ok choices, but my preference is bone. But it's your money, and if you have spare coins and like the look, brass is fine.
-
For 25.5" scale guitars I like Earvana shelf nuts. For everything else I like Tusq.
-
I like the sound of all my guitars that's why I bought them. I play them the way they came, some with each type of nut. If I were to change any I would probably go with bone or tusq just because I think they are more durable than plastic.
-
If you are using a Bigsby or other trem I recommend a Graphite Nut!
-
Ebony is nice but can be too warm/mellow if using flats, heavy pick and dark-ish guitar. To brighten tone a bit for more edge, I swapped out my ebony to a bone in my laminate box - happy with results.
-
Whatever nut you install they all have one problem in common. Cutting the nut for one string gauge and going down or up causes problems that you'd never see with a zero fret which if installed relegates the nut to horizontal positioning duty only. Gretsch got that right.
-
I'm not sure why a zero fret isn't the norm. I may install one on one of my guitars just because.
Search Results for zero glide nut | stewmac.com
-
In my experience, zero frets have every bit as many issues as nuts.
The idea that the "tone" is identical to a fret completely disregards the very large difference in downward pressure on a zero fret vs a fretted note, and the bedding-in that occurs at a ("nickel silver") zero fret.
Strings bed into a zero fret when it is new. Then the fret slightly "work-hardens", which combined with the larger contact area after bedding-in, stabilizes the process.
If you want trouble, install and level a zero fret at the same height as the others. It will soon be slightly lower.
Nuts work, so do zero frets. They each require a bit of attention to detail.
"Toneman" type tone twaddle is of course nothing new. I just caught the very end of the availability or ivory nut blanks (maybe around 1978 or so). Setting aside the misguided use of elephant ivory at all, there were indeed guys who claimed to hear the difference between ivory and bone. I could not. Nor have I been abducted by female aliens making me a love slave. I was at various times motivated by both possibilities, but neither happened.
Chris
-
A zero fret has nothing to do with tone, IMO. But being harder than standard nut materials, it wears less. All frets wear over time with use, no surprise there. I do agree that making the zero fret very slightly higher than the other frets isn't a bad idea. The big advantage that nuts have is ease of replacement. The replacement being sold by StewMac is easily replaceable, though. I'm not recommending it, because I've never tried it, just saying that I might give it a try, just for grins.
-
I would be very surprised (which happens) to find that 18% nickel silver is harder than cow bone.
-
I would be surprised the other way, but I've been surprised too. The problem is that bone varies so much in hardness. Bleached is, AFAIK, softer than unbleached, but either type varies from sample to sample. Nickel silver is very consistent. But again, I've never tried this thing, so I can't say much one way or another.
-
And further to your point, the fret wire will locally work harden under the stress and friction directly under the strings.
Last edited by ptchristopher3; 03-06-2017 at 09:47 PM. Reason: autocorrect mistake
-
A simple hardness test is the scratch test. Bone will not scratch fret wire. Fret wire will scratch bone. Fret wire is harder than any bone sample I had in my shop. I used 18% nickel silver fret wire for my tests.
-
Well that does it. I am changing all my bone back scratchers to nickel silver.
-
That might be a back scratcher too far. Bamboo works fine for me.
I just ordered a Zero Glide nut/fret, and I'll try it out on my Epi ES175. They go for <$20 on ebay with free shipping. For that money, it's worth checking. I'll report back someday.
-
I'd like to hear more about this. Originally Posted by sgosnell
-
I had forgotten about this thread. The ZeroGlide nut works fine. I perceive perhaps slightly better intonation, and about the same tone. This is unsurprising to me. I'm not sure it's worth changing to this if you already have a proper nut, but if I were going to change a nut I'd use this. It's less work, and much less time, to install it because you don't have to worry much about the slots. I did need to widen some just a little, because they were tight for the .013 set I was installing, but that's easy enough to do. The nut material behind the zero fret appears to be bone. It does take some effort to get the nut properly sized and the ends polished, but no more than a regular nut. You have to size the fretwire and polish the ends, but again that's not difficult if you have the skills to change the nut. I'm happy enough with the result, but again I don't think it's worth the trouble unless you need to change the nut anyway. If you do need a new nut, it's worth considering. The kit comes with different sizes of fretwire so you can select the one that works best on your guitar, and you need to take the time to try more than one size to insure you install the optimal size. All in all, I recommend it.
-
For me the string spacing, slot width and depth are key. Material? I can't say I have ever noticed any difference. Probably because I tend to use the open strings just as passing notes.
Last edited by icr; 05-06-2017 at 10:19 AM.
-
The only difference in material I've noticed is tunability. The strings can sometimes stick in plastic nuts, making precise tuning difficult. But once the string is tuned, I don't hear much, if any, difference in tone. But tone is very subjective and difficult to remember. The bottom line for me is that I only change nuts for reasons other than tone - sticky, broken, slots too deep, etc.
-
Home
That's the one I use.
Once it's properly installed, it works exactly as advertised. A Godsend for cowboy chords and/or all chords in the 1st position.
I've used'em in three guitars I mainly used for recording: an ES-335, a Strat and a Takamine Electric/Acoustic.
Highly recommended!
PS: Damn! I'm necrothreading... I don't know why it was shown as new i my feed?
-
It's a poll. Anytime anyone votes in the poll, it comes up as new.
Reply With Quote
Guitar purchases Reverb - EMG pickups
Today, 08:26 AM in Guitar, Amps & Gizmos