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PART 19 "YOU ALWAYS HURT THE ONE YOU LOVE OR THE ILL-TEMPERED GUITAR(S)" (intonation, jazz guitars, Gibsons..)
Last month we posed a question for the VG readership to ask themselves: What kind of new sounds are you hearing in you heads? Well, this month we've decided to address a problem that has occurred in many a vintage instrument and how you can actually fix it without modification in many cases. There has been a tragic-comic love/hate relationship between your strings and the bridges that were designed on quite a few of your classic axes.The problem involves the intonation ability or "compensation" adjustment of the bridge so that you can actually intonate it properly and accurately.
Let's go back down memory lane to about 1972 when I acquired my first real "jazz guitar", an early Fifties L-7. My teacher at the time, suggested that I use a heavy gauge string (those old Gibson 440 sets that started with a .014 and went up to a .058 with a .028 wound "G" string). That guitar along with other instruments of its circa had a wooden bridge that you were barely able to get in tune, because said bridge did not have separate string adjustment built into them. You could get it slightly into the ballpark, but still no cigar, pal.
They were annoying to say the least...always out of tune with the instrument, but NEVER right on the money. Granted, some of these guitars sounded wonderful when you had a good one, but frankly , you were always messing with that bridge, hoping that you could "dial it in" on a good day, if you were lucky. As you might guess, it was a perpetual problem. My L-7 was a really good one, you know, big ol' neck, two pickguard mounted P-90's with a gorgeous tone even though the guitar had been "refinished" with a coating of black Krylon paint over the original sunburst finish!
Still wish I had kept it, but you know that story all too well. One day, I went out to my local music store to discover they had just taken delivery of a Gibson Super 400. Larry Coryell was one of my ultimate guitar heroes at this time, so I of course wanted that mysteriously huge and exquisitely appointed guitar that I had swooned over since I had first seen it on the back of one of his first solo albums, "Coryell". It was the "kind" for me, end of story!
I bought that guitar right away and thought since it was quite an up-grade from the L-7, that my intonation problems would be solved. Right? WRONG!!! About one week into this 400, I found myself messing with that darn wooden bridge saddle over and over again! In utter frustration, I brought my new guitar to a local repairman for a look. These folks also had the reputation for making fine violins, so I figured that I could trust them to fix this problem, since they understood these arch-topped wonders.
Later that afternoon, I came back to pick up my guitar after they said the work was to be done. WARNING: This story is best read while lying down, so if you slam your head into a wall and hurt yourself, don't blame me! When I opened up the zipper-case cover, much to my absolute horror, I saw two big screws drilled into the bridge's base!
Now, I know Dracula didn't like looking into the sun, or seeing crucifixes, much less the wooden stake through his heart, but THIS was the the dreaded SILVER BULLET! I mean, I was PISSED. Anyone who knows anything about arch-tops knows that this is a crucial area of the guitar's vibrational "home"!
I very angrily asked the man responsible for this desecration, WHY he elected to put screws into the top of my new guitar. He innocently replied, "Oh, you can't hear any difference, it won't make any tonal changes at all". Did Stradivari install screws on his violin bridges so they would'nt move ? He knew better! I immediately demanded that they remove the screws and fill up the holes.
To be completely honest with you, there were two huge holes put through my heart that day which never healed. My next solution was to find a used nylon saddle "Tune-a-matic" bridge to replace the wooden one. That helped a bit, but that bridge also moved around from time to time. I had taken an Exacto blade and carefully made markings around the bridge's corners, so if it moved I could put it back into position.
Now, with the older "Tune-a-matic" bridge, there is another really annoying reality down the line. Their saddles have a tendency to "sink" down into the bridge housing after time. You probably have seen it happen to one of your Gibson instruments. When this happens, it's usually the "G" and "D" strings in the middle. If you feel an action change there, look at your bridge. More on the string-related problems of the aforementioned bridge in a little while.
I must tell you that you can have a "Compensated" wooden bridge made with each string's length adjustment built right in by guys like Ralph Novak and Stephen White. Since wooden bridges sound way better than metal ones, it's just the way to go if you want that "Tone". This type of bridge is totally retrofit and won't hurt your vintage guitar's value since no real modification is needed. You just replace the metal one with the wooden one. Stephen had spent an entire day working on an old `50s Epiphone Regent trying to find out what gauge of strings really intonated with the guitar's so-called "compensated" bridge. He found that the following gauges worked best; .012,.016,.22w..036,.046, and .050. Excuse me? Don't you think that the string gauges listed above are a LITTLE unbalanced? Yeah, I would think so...the jump from the .022 to the .036 is a bit radical for any good jazz player in my own estimation.
Above, I told you what I used on my L-7 and with the right set-up you don't even feel the tautness of the strings, your fingers just glide over the fingerboard. You can have the lowest action and the highest playability with heavier strings. No buzz at all! These gauges certainly won't hurt the strength of your hands, either.
The next step up in pumping iron is getting the Rickenbacker twelve-string down, that guitar has double the tension of any six-string. Forget that "GripMaster" isometric device, I have found out in my own experience that those things are dangerous if used on a dare from some guy who thinks he's too cool. Just play the size of string that suits the physical aspects of your hands and the rest will follow suit.
Now, back to more intonation terrorism. The Rickenbacker twelve-string bridge (the six-saddle type) has its own inherent tuning problems. Unless you get their twelve-saddle bridge, you're in trouble. There is just NO WAY you will be able to get the lower strings intonated with the octave strings with the vintage-style six-piece bridge, it's just impossible with the immutable laws of physics factored in.
History has proven that guitars like Gibson's ES-335-12, Firebird 12s, Baldwins, Burns, etc. just don't intone properly. You can't just thrown six more strings on a six piece saddle and expect it to play right. "Wow, now we've got a twelve-string guitar!" With the only exception being a Fender Electric XII which was designed to be nothing other than a twelve-string guitar, you don't have many real viable alternatives. Have you ever tried to intonate a Telecaster with the old-style three-saddle bridge using a plain "G" string? Hmmm, what fun!
Actually, a wound third string works quite a bit better as the Fender guitars were shipped originally with wound thirds in the beginning. Same with the Stratocaster, too. The good news is that with Fenders at least they gave you the option of separate string height adjustment to follow the fingerboard's curvature.
Even the Gibson "Tune-a-matic" bridge won't give you that feature, either. Imagine this; if you slot a saddle on the Gibson bridge too low, the other five saddles will have to go down as well. And, when you play the guitar a lot and hard at the same time, the saddle's grooves will go even further down with time. Oh, well. Another bridge which can cause problems is the wrap-around style found on the less expensive Les Paul Junior and Special models along with their S.G. model counterparts.
Those types with the "ridges" on the top won't intonate with plain thirds, either...wound strings here also work more beneficially. Leslie West sure wasn't in tune with his Les Paul Junior, he had to bend the strings a bit more to compensate. Another possibility that lurks in the lower-end Les Pauls is that their bridges were routed in the wrong spot to begin with in many cases. You must remember that these guitar were considered budget-models at the time and were produced as such.
I was a victim of a misrouted Junior. Yeah, Stephen finally got it "in the pocket" after re-doweling the guitar and re-centering the bridge in the right place, and now, it's a beautiful thing. My question always is revolving around the strings that the guitar companies like Gibson put on their guitars; did they invent all their weird gauging based upon their bridge design(s)? I can say that I don't believe this theory, because there's too many metalurgical variables in the outer wrap and the sizes of the core (and it's material alloy) which can affect the bridge and other components of an instrument that really matter.
Playing in tune is a very critical issue and when you hear all these funny oscillations, it can drive you nuts. I really think that there can be heavier more durable bridge designs to solve all of these problems. I'm off to NAMM to investigate what has been updated since last year. I'm very interested in what might be in store for all of us. For more on guitar hardware, please check out the review from NAMM 1995 in the March issue of VG. I sincerely hope that this column might steer the manufacturers to improve upon what's currently being passed off as "current" state-of-the art stuff. Sooner of later, we're gonna need a source of solid, reliable replacements for all of our vintage instruments to keep them alive and sounding better than ever. Real improvements never hurt. See you next time with what we find at NAMM 96.
Copyright 1995 by Dean L. Farley
Reprinted from "Vintage Guitar" November 1995 issue.