thanks a lot for the info. I will give them a shot, but if they don't sound good I will be prepared to go back to the normal saddles.I find the graphtec saddles really produce a warm, fundamental focused tone...they seem to knock downhigh end, upper harmonic complexity and jangle and yeah, they can definitely sound dull and lifeless. I use 'em on one guitar where I had issues with mechanical noise and an unpleasent clankly metallic overhang from a Floyd Rose and they cleaned up the sound of that guitar nicely. A good solution for a particular proble. But I probably wouldn't choose to use them in any other circumstance.
While it's true that one man's dull can be another man's warm, I say if you want to warm up a guitar, try pure nickel strings -- that will give you more warmth and body than steel wound or even NPS strings without robbing your tone of the upper harmonics that give it life and presence and articulation. But, for me, I'd only back to Graphtech if I had a real frustrating problem with a zingy metallic guitar or with excessive string breakage with a trem bar...mostly otherwise I'd say away from graphtech for saddles.
I have the saddles on a tune-o-matic. I used to break tons of strings, then about 8 years ago I put the graphtechs on. Never broke another string on that guitar, and it gets played a lot.
Negligible effect on sound or feel for my purposes. This guitar still sounds wonderful unplugged and amplified, clean or dirty.
Does anyone know if the saddles that fit the tune o matic will also fit a gotoh bridge?
my ESP has gotoh. I tried to put a tune o matic bridge from my ec1000 on it and even though it fit, it still sounded bad. Like the intonation was off. Even though I just intonated it with the tune o matic bridge.
Edit... why would this be? Could it be that I just suck at intonating guitars? Because that is definitely a possibility.
I had the exact same reaction to the Graphtech saddles I put on a tune-o-matic.I tried the graphtec saddles is a few Strats and, while they seem to help with with less string breakage and better trem return to pitch, they changed the tone in a way that I did not like. To my ears, they sounded duller than the original bent steel one's and seemed to have an upper mid emphasis.
Allparts lists separate Graph Tech saddles for the Gotoh tunematic - BP 2446-00G