What Faber® Bridge Saddles Should I Get?

So, you’ve decided on your new bridge but now you are unsure of which type of saddle to choose. Faber offer saddles in a range of materials:

• Nickel Plated Brass
• Aged Nickel Plated Brass
• Natural Brass
• Aged Natural Brass
• Titanium

Faber also offers all saddles as unnotched allowing the installer to cut their own string slots. We recommend this is carried out by a professional luthier to ensure accurate alignment.

There are two main reasons people choose specific materials for saddles, aesthetic and tonal. Your Gibson USA or import model will most likely be pre-installed with nickel plated brass saddles. There is nothing wrong with nickel plated brass, many players choose to keep the factory installed saddles in place. A common upgrade that some players make is from nickel plated brass to natural brass. The theory is that natural brass will provide a warmer, more vintage tone, however, there is no audible tonal difference between nickel plated brass and natural brass saddles. This change is purely aesthetic.

The biggest tonal change you can make to bridge saddles is adding titanium saddles. Titanium saddles will provide a noticeably brighter and tighter tone. We recommend that if you have a guitar with a naturally bright sound that a whole titanium saddle loaded bridge might result in the guitar becoming brighter than it naturally is and sounding too bright. Titanium saddles are the perfect upgrade if you feel your guitar is a little too dark sounding and you want to enhance the top end response.

If your guitar does have a naturally bright tone but you still want to experiment with titanium, then we would recommend our HYBRIDge system. The HYBRIDge is a combination of brass and titanium saddles for specific strings to achieve your ideal tone across the string range. If choosing this option, we recommend titanium saddles for the lower strings and brass for the higher. The titanium saddles will add extra brightness to the lower strings and remove any muddy frequencies. They will also make the strings sound tighter. The brass saddles for the higher strings will provide a rounder, warmer tone. The combination of both saddle types will provide the most balanced tone across the strings.

All Faber bridge saddles are direct replacement parts and will fit any Faber bridge with removable saddles except for the Wraptonate model. They do not fit a Gibson ABR-1 or any other brand’s bridge. All saddles are sold in packs of 3, and the packs aren’t treble- or bass-specific. 2 packs will be needed to re-saddle an entire bridge. Each pack of 3 saddles includes a retaining ring for each saddle. Retaining rings and bridge saddle screws are also available separately if replacements are required.

Do Faber Saddles Need to Be Notched?

All Faber bridges come with saddles that have starter positioning notches, a small notch dead center on each saddle. They can be used as is. The plain strings sit easily in the notches. The wound strings don’t, but under tuned string tension they bind a bit and won’t move side to side, and some players are satisfied with that. For best results, we recommend notching the saddles to your string gauge. At minimum, deepen the wound-string notches. Otherwise the bridge’s 12″ radius is off. Leftover burrs in the plain-string notches can cause a sitar effect, which is fixed by sanding the burrs off. A string can also sound dead if its notch isn’t properly gauged.

Unnotched saddles contain no starter notch, the saddle top is totally flat. The saddles will need to be notched prior to string installation. This saddle configuration gives you the freedom to have the notches cut to your specification. Nylon saddles are only available this way, without starter positioning notches. Whether you’re notching unnotched saddles or deepening the starter positioning notches, doing it right takes a proper set of gauged notching files, which most players don’t have. Without them, the only way to get it done properly is a qualified guitar tech with the right files. Inexpensive saddle and nut file sets do a crude job, but they’re better than nothing. Most of them aren’t sized in imperial decimal, so you’ll need to convert from metric to pick the right file for each string.