Upgrading your bass bridge can have a number of advantages including: increasing sustain, increasing tuning stability, gaining more adjustability, dropping weight, or simply changing the aesthetics of a bass. Whatever your reason is, I’ve created a simple guide to help you get started. Feel free to reply with questions or start a discussion on our blog as you read along.
The first step in the process is to pick which bridge is going to work for your bass. Feel free to contact us about the correct choice, we will be happy to guide you along the way. Best Bass Gear sells top quality bridges including: Leo Quan Badass bridges, Babicz Full Contact bridges, and Hipshot bridges. Max and I have experience installing them on different models of basses and we stand behind the quality of all three of these manufacturers.
Most basses use a bridge with one of the standard mounting hole patterns. To determine which your bass has, you can either measure what is currently installed on your bass, look online to see if anyone else with your bass has swapped out the bridge, or simply asking us to look through our databases (we know the mounting patterns of many brands, but you will often still need to measure to confirm). If you’re able to buy a bridge with your mounting pattern, installation is quite easy.
Five Things You Need To Know About Bridges
Note: If your bass uses a mounting pattern which does not have a direct replacement, new holes will need to be drilled into your bass. We
First, remove all strings from your instrument. Then, unscrew all mounting screws on your current bridge. Remove the bridge and place the new bridge in it’s place. You should have a small grounding wire running from the bottom of the bridge to your control cavity. Before you move on to screwing the bridge in place, make sure the end of this wire will be contacting your bridge. You can then screw down your new bridge and restring your bass.
To set string height you will need all the strings tuned to pitch. Hold the bass in the playing position and measure from the top of the 17th fret to the bottom of your lowest string, while not fretting any notes. The distance between these points should be 3/32″.
Install A Badass Or Omega Bridge On Your Bass.
Depending on many factors, including personal preference, you may end up raising or lowering the string past this number, but 3/32″ is a good average starting point I recommend. Different bridges have different ways to raise or lower the strings. Most, like Hipshot and Badass, use two allen screws on each saddle to raise or lower the string. Full Contact bridges use a single allen wrench to turn a cam which will raise or lower the string. Once you have the lowest string set to 3/32″ you should retune the string and check your measurement again. You can then go on to each string until all of the strings are an appropriate height from the 17th fret. Many people set their highest strings slightly closer to the fret than their lower strings.
To test height accuracy, play your bass listening for any string buzz (often signaling a string being too low) and pay attention to how easily you can fret notes (high strings often make playing difficult for some players).
The new bridge. For this you will need a good quality tuner and an appropriate screwdriver to adjust your bridge saddle position. You first want to tune all strings to pitch. Then, you will compare the sound of the harmonic at the 12th fret of your lowest string to the sound of the fretted note at the 12th fret, using as much fretting pressure as you normally use while playing. You will want to adjust your bridge saddle until the harmonic note and fretted note are the same exact pitch.
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Move the bridge by adjusting the screw at the end of your bridge that connects it to the saddle. Tightening this screw will move the saddle away from the neck, while loosening the screw will move the saddle closer to the neck. Repeat these steps on all strings, making sure to tune and retune the strings between adjustments.
I recommend using the Cruz Tools GrooveTech Bass Player Tech Kit because it will help in properly setting string height and intonation and will help keep your bass set up properly. Among other things, the tool kit includes a 6-in-1 screwdriver and steel ruler which are needed to change your bass bridge.
As previously mentioned, if you have any questions, feel free to reply to this email, start a discussion on the eBass blog, or post on BBG’s facebook wall. Either myself, Max, or Chris will respond to any of your questions. Last time (Tuner Replacement Guide) we received great feedback and were able to help quite a few customers out.Every component on or in your bass is there for a reason, but some have bigger and more important jobs to do than others. There are those parts with an obvious purpose, and others that are more mysterious. Tuners, nuts, pickups, pots, knobs, switches and straphangers all have clear functions to perform … though they also may be imbued with style points as a side benefit. But when you get down to it, whether you’re talking function or form, there’s no part of your bass with a more important role to play than the bridge.
Making An Acoustic Guitar Saddle
This was something I didn’t know when I first started playing bass. (That’s because, as every parent has discovered, teenagers know everything.) My attitude when it came to learning anything about my instrument was, just stop talking and hand me the screwdriver. So, armed with youthful ignorance and ham-handed luthery, I attacked my first bass’ bridge and turned what was an already finicky instrument into an unplayable, jangling nightmare.
These days I know that the bridge should not be disrespected, because it is actually the fulcrum for everything your bass does. For starters, it’s the platform that enables the strings to pass over the pickup(s), and it also serves as the high-mass contact point for strings to connect with the bass’ body. In large part, that’s where vibrations — and therefore, the sound of the instrument pre-amplification — live and die. And yet we’re still only scratching the surface of what the bridge does and how it works.
Designed to be moved slightly forward and backward (affecting intonation), as well as up or down (affecting the all-important playability factor of string height, or “action”). These small tweaks enable the proper set-up for your bass. Without that ability … well, think about having a car where you never rotated the tires, and where the chassis sat on a suspension made from mattress springs and barbed wire. You can drive it, but is it comfortable and efficient? How does it feel when cornering at high speed?
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A correctly intonated bass responds with perfect pitch whether you’re playing an open string or anywhere up and down the neck. String height — the desired amount of space between the bottom of the strings and the crown of the frets — is a subjective preference. The two things are co-dependent in that every slight adjustment made to a saddle’s height will affect the intonation for that string, and every millimeter adjustment of the saddle forward or backward to intonate the bass will impact the action. (There are other factors that come into play here — particularly the tension of the truss rod underneath the fretboard — but that’s a story for another day.)
Bridges have a slot (or a drilled hole) through which each string must be threaded, gripping the ball-end of the string so that the adjustable tuner at the top of the neck can be used to create the appropriate tension required for the string to vibrate. The pickup then captures those vibrations and converts them into a signal that can be amplified. You’ll find top-loading bridges in Yamaha RBX and TRBX basses.
Bridges are slightly different in that the string runs into holes located on the underside or bottom of the bass before it passes through the body and over the saddles. The “break angle” at which the strings pass over the saddle (which creates the right amount of downward pressure to maximize string performance) is steeper than it is with a top-loading bridge, and although it’s a nuanced thing, some players say that string-through-body bridges deliver more resonance and sustain. Yamaha BB Series basses incorporate diagonal body-through stringing, whereby the strings are angled at the saddle and pass through the instrument to the bridge at a 45ยบ angle, as opposed to the traditional vertical stringing method, which places more stress on the strings.
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A great way to find out which type is better for you is to get your hands on a Yamaha bass (such as a BB Pro Series , BB 700 Series , BB 400 Series or BBPH Peter Hook Signature BB bass ) that comes equipped with a Vintage Plus or Vintage Plus Light bridge. These “convertible” bridges offer both top-loading and
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