Hardtail Bridge

The Mastery Bridge features precisely-curved adjustable saddles that allow you to effortlessly set-up to any common fingerboard radius, from 7.25″ onward. Although guitar manufacturers will CNC radius fingerboards to certain specs, it’s the top of the fret that matters and should be measured, and that can change/vary overtime due to slight unevenness and eventual playing wear. Different climactic conditions can move the wood of your neck and not the frets, and depending on how malleable your fretwire is it will move or not move with it, causing slight unevenness. Varying string thickness will also affect the top of the string radius; depending on the thickness of your strings you’ll want to adjust to them accordingly. Heavy-handed players also like our adjustable saddle design because they can easily raise the bass side of the strings slightly for hard-hitting. The saddles eliminate annoying “buzzing” or rattle associated with previous single saddle bridge designs. Adjustable radius bridge saddles like ours is important for slight tweaking on first install and in the long run.

Plain brass, plain steel and plain stainless steel saddles eventually wear grooves into the saddle with vibrato use, which can cause muted tones and string breakage. Plain brass is the softest of these materials and can begin to wear within hours of vibrato use. The more surface area there is in a saddle groove, the more problems can arise later on. A steel string on an unfinished saddle naturally generates heat with heavy vibrato use, and that heat will expand the metal in your string and cause it to go out of tune. We use brass for our saddles, a softer, warmer-sounding metal, but plate them with a unique hard chrome plating not found on any other guitar bridge.

Hard chrome plating is commonly used to reduce friction and heat along with increase wear resistance in parts like piston rings, firearms, airplane landing gear and bearing surfaces. It generates far less heat with vibrato use and your strings stay better in tune. Although much more expensive to manufacture than plain or “decorative chrome” saddles found on other bridges, our saddles’ unique hard chrome-plating aids in lubricity while tuning or actuating the vibrato of an Offset or Bigsby-equipped guitar, ensuring years of consistent performance and accuracy. No other bridge manufacturer uses a plating this durable. Our saddles will remain the hardest surface on your guitar.

Our Hardtail baseplate is CNC water-cut from a solid, 304 stainless non-ferrous steel sheet and stamped with our tooling to the specified profile. Each one is then hand sanded and tumbled to de-burr and break any sharp edges. The plates are media blasted and our logo is then CNC engraved. Our baseplates blend well aesthetically on both vintage and new guitars The Mastery M7.1 and M9.1 Bridge for Bigsby B5 users features cutouts in the back of the baseplate along with our unique hard chrome plated brass saddles to ensure your strings will glide smoothly over the surface of the saddles without any chance of interference or pinching in worn string grooves. We also offer Top Loaded (M6.2, M7.2, M8.2, M9.2) Hardtail bridges that have string through/top loading options.

We do not make one-off hardtail bridges. For technical questions pertaining to the Mastery Bridge on your guitar, contact owner/luthier:
John Woodland: woody@masterybridge.com

Please note: We currently do not offer American Standard or other style baseplates for the Tele Mastery Bridge. We do not offer the Offset Bridge with plain brass saddles and do not sell saddles individually. Brass saddles on any bridge will succumb to string wear over time and our plain brass saddle option Hardtail bridges are not warrantied against this sort of natural wear.