Positioning non adjustable bridge

[jazzbow]

Indeed, and I do not mean to crap on the idea of posting the vid. Great point to trust the ears and not blindly follow the tuner.

I just wish MT had not name-dropped terms very very inaccurately.

No worries matey.

I have had long conversations about tuning with me mate Bill, the piano restorer. It made my brain hurt.

But his knowledge on wood glue is an education!

[Para]

Dom, the guitar being a temperate tuned instrument it is never going to be perfectly in tune all over the board, I usually intonate the top and bottom E at the 12 fret to get the bridge positioned and start from there that will get you in the ballpark then check the other strings and balance them the best you can. Back in the '60s when I started playing the intonation on a lot of electric guitars Strats etc was rubbish I used to balance the intonation from the 19 fret all down the fretboard which meant most of the strings were very slightly flat, it is a quirk of the human hearing that it can tolerate a slightly flat note but not a sharp one, if you have perfect pitch which I no longer have sharp notes can be extremely irritating.

[icr]

I try to play fast enough so the audience can't hear the beats :0

Saddle placement is always a compromize and I don't get to bent out of shape over it, because without a compensated nut any saddle setup is just an approximation.

If I'm setting up a guitar with a straight saddle, I use flatwound set with flatwound third string. These tend to intonate ok in a straight line. If I'm setting up a guitar with roundwounds and a non-wound third, I perfer some kind of tune-o-matic. Frequently with the third string saddle reversed from the others to get enough range between the high E and the G as those two can be pretty far apart.

[Sacco]

With flat strings on a Samick LaSalle JZ4. I tried and tried and tried. No fixed bridge that I know of really worked. (tried a goldo and two good bridges from Ali express)

Only the original tune o matic has the required calibration capabilities. It kills the sound a bit compared to a solid bridge (or not, I can't really tell) but god darn it!!! the slightly sharp or flat notes were driving me nuts and having the guitar perfectly in tune is far more important to me.

[Greentone]

In the era of fat strings and wound 3rd strings, this wasn't much of a problem. Light gauge strings in the 60s made the wooden bridge sound...ahem.

Now, with guitars coming from the factory with 10s at most, wooden bridge tops are tough to deal with.

Try a set of 12s or 13s.

[christianm77]

What on earth would anybody be doing playing such a guitar without a wound 3rd?

[DanielleOM]

With flat strings on a Samick LaSalle JZ4. I tried and tried and tried. No fixed bridge that I know of really worked. (tried a goldo and two good bridges from Ali express)

Only the original tune o matic has the required calibration capabilities. It kills the sound a bit compared to a solid bridge (or not, I can't really tell) but god darn it!!! the slightly sharp or flat notes were driving me nuts and having the guitar perfectly in tune is far more important to me.

A good luthier can take a standard archtop bridge and modify / compensate it to match your guitar and string set.

I found if the compensation is off, things work best for me if the bridge is placed so that that the compensation is correct or flat. If I have a string that goes flat as you go up the neck, I think we subconsciously bend it to pitch. Can't do that if the string goes sharp while going up the neck.

[Sacco]

I do, I play with 11s and 13s, flat wound G...gives you the same problem. Maybe I'm too picky about intonation (I have a strong sense of pitch) and bothers me when I hear notes slightly off. Decided to go to it's original TOM bridge over a rosewood base. Is the only way to get the intonation perfect.

BTW: Comparing bridges the TOM one didn't modify it's sound much, nothing that would be a problem.

[Sacco]

Alright, so after finding the right intonation curve with the TOM bridge it was closer to the Goldo model. So I swapped it to that and got it practically perfectly intonated.

BTW, the TOM bridge sound sucks! ....real bad, makes the guitar really dull and lifeless. So forget what I said before.