A friend and bandmate came to me with intonation issues on his Gretsch. The problem is that a lot of these guitars come with floating bridges. While they look classic and maintain a certain aesthetic they are quite temperamental if you’re a heavy handed player so even with heavy gauge strings the bridge has a hard time staying settled.
The first thing we did was sand down the bridge base so that it better matched the curvature of the top of the guitar. The scale length was then checked and the bridge was positioned and marked off to aid with the final install. Double stick tape was then applied to the bottom of the bridge base and then the guitar was re-strung. This helped the guitar for a good while and then as with many kinds of tape…it failed. The intonation was bad enough that a basic E chord sounded kind of odd. This was the point where a more substantial change was needed. We put pins in the bridge feet with matching holes in the top of the guitar. The benefit of this is that the bridge will not shift under animated playing and will be very easy to intonate because it will always mount in the same spot.
This guitar also lost its 1/4″ jack at one point so we did some fishing and made a custom aluminum plate to better handle the stresses of gigging. The instruments case also needed to be saved so I saved it.
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