Wraparound guitar bridge3/8/2023 ![]() Even if this little story is not exactly about a guitar bridge, it is bridge related, so here goes. When you think outside the box, you sometimes stumble upon surprising ideas. But – it is certainly useful to be aware of the fact that a steel plate surrounding a pickup affects the pickup sound due to the change of the magnetic flux. It’s all a matter of personal preference. One would say the sound improves – while another hears the alteration in a negative way. When you change the bridge material to a non-magnetic material – like brass or stainless steel – the sound of the guitar changes. The steel plate changes the shape of the pickup magnetic field, contributing to the characteristic edgy sound of the guitar. There are a number of factors contributing to this special tonal character but not many come to think that one of the key reasons for the twangy sound is the traditional t-style bridge baseplate made of steel, which functions as a mounting ring for the bridge pickup as well. Why do some guitars have a “twangy” sound? The sharp, bright, percussive, mid-rangy, in-your-face type tone that works great to a wide variety of music, most often connected to t-style guitars. Download the Guitar Creator app and there you’ll have it! We were so excited about this new bridge concept that we decided to started offering it as an option for all the Unicorn and the Duke guitars. The most rock solid wraparound bridge solution ever! So now I had the ABM 3024 wraparound bridge locked in place with the Schroeder studs, and the whole unit anchored to the body with our own Lock-Thru-Body bushings. I pointed out a little shortcoming about the total height of the unit, and to my amazement the guys at ABM were thankful for my feedback and improved the design before launching it. They had milled it from a billet of aircraft grade aluminium, and the bridge sounded and felt phenomenal. They sent me a prototype, which seemed absolutely great. I contacted ABM and it turned out they were right in the middle of developing a new wraparound bridge. It would need to also meet our strict quality requirements. ![]() To complete our task we needed a great wraparound bridge with the right feel. Why? Because you need to drill a hole through the body! But with my guitars, I’m free from the vintage ghosts, so this was the perfect solution for us. It wouldn’t work as an aftermarket part for vintage guitars though. Lari made the first prototypes in our shop basement with his 100 years old lathe, and they turned out perfect. But we couldn’t find anything like it anywhere. A really simple fix to a nasty problem! One of those moments when we thought that somebody must have figured this out before us. We came up with the idea to lock the bushings through the body. Lari is quite a wizard with not only understanding mechanics, but he also has the skills to do the metal work. I couldn’t find any ready made solutions for the problem, so Lari and I started brainstorming the part. We’ve continued using the Schroeder locking studs ever since, in all the guitars we make with wraparound bridge. The quality was excellent, and the studs did exactly the job I wanted them for. Jason had gotten there first! I ordered a few of those studs to try them out. Then I stumbled upon the locking studs my fellow luthier Jason Schroeder had designed. Lari (one of my luthiers) and I were drawing a locking stud that would be easy to use. I wanted it to have a wraparound bridge – if only those drawbacks were solved somehow. I’ve felt it’s not designed right, and so I’ve steered clear of it.Ī few years back I started to design the Unicorn Supersonic guitar. There is a constant force of about 60 kilograms pulling the wraparound bridge forward, so it’s no wonder that sometimes the wood gives in. This can happen if the fit of the bushings is too loose – or if the body wood is soft (like mahogany or spanish cedar) and the wood compresses over time, making the holes oval shaped. Or, the bushings have started to crawl up from their holes. I’ve seen guitars where the bushings of the wraparound bridge have given in and the whole unit is leaning forward. This results usually that after adjustments the bridge sits leaning forward, in an angled position in the loose stud slots. The traditional wraparound models are mounted with studs that need to have a pretty loose tolerance so there’s any room to balance the height of the low and high strings. I was reluctant for a long time to offer wraparound bridges in any of my guitars. This story describes perfectly my approach to guitar design in general. I’ll start from wraparound bridges for one particular reason.
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