Should I swap plastic bridge pins for bone or wood?

Supportact

I changed to wooden bridge pins just on a whim. I can't say I noticed any difference in sound, but I prefer the way they look. 

Stratavarious

I put some ebony ones with nice abalone tops on my wife’s acoustic and she comments on how pretty they look.

Eye candy, not tone candy

Mellish

Some will say they can't hear a difference in tone between plastic, wood or bone. Others will swear they can. Me, I just put in what I think looks best which, to me, is Bob Colosi bone. He's got some gorgeous dyed ones on his website  

bertie

Stratavarious said:

I put some ebony ones with nice abalone tops on my wife’s acoustic and she comments on how pretty they look.

Eye candy, not tone candy

I take it she cant sing then ?   

Evan

Mellish said:

Some will say they can't hear a difference in tone between plastic, wood or bone. Others will swear they can. Me, I just put in what I think looks best which, to me, is Bob Colosi bone. He's got some gorgeous dyed ones on his website  

Just had a look, they are lovely .

bertie

Evan said:

Mellish said:

Some will say they can't hear a difference in tone between plastic, wood or bone. Others will swear they can. Me, I just put in what I think looks best which, to me, is Bob Colosi bone. He's got some gorgeous dyed ones on his website  

Just had a look, they are lovely .

shame about the use of elephant ivory tho    

Mellish

@bertie ; brother you can say *that*again. That's one bridge pins material I'd never buy

bertie

Mellish said:

@bertie ; brother you can say *that*again. That's one bridge pins material I'd never buy

he seems to be "open" about it -  on the home page it states "cannot ship elephant ivory out of georgia"   or words to that effect. 

Hes' getting no trade from me 

Mellish

@bertie ; maybe that's more to do with licencing than him personally. That's a pure guess on my part, though. I have had problems with his bone saddles but years ago.  Mostly I use bone but Antique Acoustics does lovely galalith pins if you're interested  

bertie

Mellish said:

@bertie ; maybe that's more to do with licencing than him personally. That's a pure guess on my part, though. I have had problems with his bone saddles but years ago.  Mostly I use bone but Antique Acoustics does lovely galalith pins if you're interested  

Ive ordered bespoke stuff before from a guy in the UK  - he was very good, well packaged etc.  Cant remember his name,  sure it was Steve ...............................  I'll see if I can find "something" with his name/site on


EDIT

Chris Alsop 
 

Mellish

So who's this Steve then?  

Evan

bertie said:

Mellish said:

@bertie ; maybe that's more to do with licencing than him personally. That's a pure guess on my part, though. I have had problems with his bone saddles but years ago.  Mostly I use bone but Antique Acoustics does lovely galalith pins if you're interested  

Ive ordered bespoke stuff before from a guy in the UK  - he was very good, well packaged etc.  Cant remember his name,  sure it was Steve ...............................  I'll see if I can find "something" with his name/site on


EDIT

Chris Alsop 
 

You just knew it began with “S”, didn’t you. I’ll Google this Steve bloke.

bertie

Evan said:

bertie said:

Mellish said:

@bertie ; maybe that's more to do with licencing than him personally. That's a pure guess on my part, though. I have had problems with his bone saddles but years ago.  Mostly I use bone but Antique Acoustics does lovely galalith pins if you're interested  

Ive ordered bespoke stuff before from a guy in the UK  - he was very good, well packaged etc.  Cant remember his name,  sure it was Steve ...............................  I'll see if I can find "something" with his name/site on


EDIT

Chris Alsop 
 

You just knew it began with “S”, didn’t you. I’ll Google this Steve bloke.

no good, he's retired 

BillDL

@bertie I know exactly how you feel about the use of elephant ivory.  Even though it is most probable that the person has made the bridge pins from old ivory that existed in some other form long before trade restrictions and probably has some documentation to prove its age, I still don't like the idea of having elephant tusk material on anything I own.  I have a similar dilemma with something in a box in my Mother's loft.  My Father was a saddler in Africa and for most of his years there he had to buy leather that was tanned in the UK and imported, however once in a while a local leather supplier was able to offer more exotic hides like antelope.  He bought some superbly soft leather from elephant ear some time around the late 60s or early 70s.  The story behind it was that game rangers had been monitoring a herd and a younger one had died from natural causes.  In those days somebody would certainly have removed the tusks from the carcass, but it would have taken somebody with knowledge of preserving leather to use the ears.  Although I do not doubt that is the story my Father was given (because I'm sure he would have asked whether it had been hunted), I have no way of authenticating the history.  It could be that a large piece of elephant ear leather could be worth quite a lot of money, but it makes me feel a bit sick when I see and handle it.

Oh yeah, fossilised walrus and woolly mammoth ivory.  I admit that they look a bit different to bleached bone or similar animal products, but are they really going to make your guitar sound any better?

https://www.guitarsaddles.com/products.asp

What's next?  Rhinoceros horn, giant panda baculum, hen's tooth?

If somebody really wants the overall appearance of ivory for anything, the closest I have seen in terms of appearance is "vegetable ivory" from the seed of certain palm trees.  It is easily as hard or possibly harder than any plastic I've seen used on guitars (except maybe the hard urea based plastic used for the nuts on guitars by Yamaha and others), but vegetable ivory isn't brittle like bone, horn and animal ivory.  I've seen loads of very hard objects like buttons, chess pieces, knife handles etc carved from the seeds of African fan palms but more recently I've seen goods carved from the South American Tagua Nut. Discussed by a luthier HERE.  The alternative Tusq pins also look nice, but they are expensive and the edges of the string grooves can crack off quite easily.

bertie

BillDL said:

@bertie I know exactly how you feel about the use of elephant ivory.  Even though it is most probable that the person has made the bridge pins from old ivory

quite probably,  but the mere fact he's willing to sell regardless is an immediate "you're out"  for me

Evan

I wouldn’t object morally to wearing a fur coat that came from the dim and distant past, it’d seem such a waste and sort of disrespectful to the animal to turn my nose up at it just to make myself feel all holier than thou, though I’m definitely dead against killing animals for fur in the present day. 

I would object on stylistic grounds though, I’d look like a right old tart.

Mellish

@bertie ; "No good, he's retired". I wondered why his workshop was closed  

artiebear

As others have said, no difference except brass which introduces an awful "zing" to the string, in a most unmusical way. One of my guitars came equipped with "mammoth ivory" pins. I was totally ignorant of the fact for 3 years after receiving it. I actually found the whole thing a bit distasteful, worried that it was simply a way of describing ivory obtained from a much more contemporary creature ? ( I haven't been inclined to do much research in this area, others may know better ). In truth the guitar sounds just the same with plastic pins.

Got a few with ebony pins, guess what ? they sound just the same as plastic pins. 

TheMadMick

Try it and find out. It's not expensive unless you go for the Martins.

ICBM

artiebear said:

One of my guitars came equipped with "mammoth ivory" pins. I was totally ignorant of the fact for 3 years after receiving it. I actually found the whole thing a bit distasteful, worried that it was simply a way of describing ivory obtained from a much more contemporary creature ? ( I haven't been inclined to do much research in this area, others may know better ).

No, mammoth ivory is a real thing - there are thousands of dead mammoths in the permafrost in Siberia... maybe millions, since even a dead mammoth that was scavenged or completely decomposed would retain the tusks. It's apparently quite common to find them, and it's a legitimate source of the material. It's not hugely expensive as it can't be substituted for elephant ivory normally, since it's a very different colour due to ageing over thousands of years.

My '71 Martin D12-35 apparently has a walrus ivory nut, which I think is now illegal to sell as well - although I could be wrong. I'm not actually a fan - it tends to 'grab' the strings when tuning, in a way that hard plastic (eg Corian) and bone don't seem to... especially annoying on a 12-string. It's not quite bad enough to bother changing it, although I have thought about it. I'll never sell the guitar though, so it's not an issue from that point of view.