Fix Your Guitar How To Install Compensated Tele-style Saddles

A nifty intonation-improving upgrade is now available for ashtray bridges…

- Jack Ellis

The ashtray bridge gets its name from an ornate cover that it was originally sold with – this masks the rather unsightly saddles and pickup; ever noticed how pretty the neck pickup is compared to the bridge one? The cover was often not used but was found to be handy as an ashtray instead!

There are a few bridge types – brass saddles, threaded bar saddles, stainless steel and chromed saddles – and each has been argued to sound better than the six saddle Tele bridges. The simple answer is less moving parts means more of the strings’ vibration is transferred to the body, improving sustain. The not so obvious downside is that the three saddles have to share intonation points – the critical part which fine-tunes how in-tune your guitar is as you play up the neck. Compensated saddles have an intonation point preset into them to solve this problem.

Here’s how to install and set them, and how not to get confused on which damn way round they should be!

1 Before beginning, take a reading of your action – that’s string height. Hold up a ruler at the 12th fret and measure the distance between 12th fret and the bottom of the string on both E strings – we’ll restore this later. Now those strings are just going to be in the way so let’s remove them to get a clean shot at it.