bridge pin upgrade???

[markanthony]

Hi all just wanted some input on bridge pins,some say an upgrade to bone or ivory can help your tone and some say its just hype.I think bone pins might be a nice way to dress up you  guitar. I'm just not sure about any changes in tone.

[Blue in VT]

Mark,

On my parlor I upgraded from the plastic pins that came with it to ebony with pearl dots...they look great...I'm not sure what effect they had on the tone...I added a bone saddle at the same time...the combo of the two made a tremendous difference in balancing out the tone of this little blues box...I say go for it!



Blue

[jwu53]

As I understand it, the purpose of bridge pins is just to secure the side of the string down the hole against the side of the bridge so that the ball-end locks into place against the bottom of the bridge, so the pin shouldn't really be transferring much string vibration, as most all the holding tension is on the bottom of the bridge. In fact, pinless bridges which merely hold the ball-end directly (as Lowden and some others do) work just fine - but I think tradition prevails here as most acoustics use pins. 

I've used plastic, ebony, and tusq pins, and never noticed any difference in sound between these. But it seems a shame somehow to have a cheap plastic part on my nice Larrivees, so I bought some tusq pins from FQMS for the L-03R (the LS-05 came with ebony).

[Daysailer]

Got some camel  bone pins on my OM

Didnt really notice any tone change.
Like the look, with ivoriod tuner buttons.
Kinda ties in with the fretboard binding and maple body binding.

[inspector13]

I swapped the ebony pins for bone. They look great, but no real noticeable change in tone.

[poki]

i just put Fossil walrus ivory pins in my goodal parlor. there was a tone difference after the pin change but i also changed strings and made a FW ivory saddle from a blank at the same time so i can't really say if the ivory pins made a difference from the ebony ones.  goodalll saddles are compensated and shaped quite different than larrivees as can be seen.  the pins are slightly oversized so you'll probably need to fit them individually. i used a diamond dust file to slowly narrow down the pin diameter.
Bob Colossi is the man to see.

by the way the ivory smells exactly the same as bone when being worked with dremels tools.  which is to say it has that pungent "organic" odor to it.

[jmhyer]

I think there is often a noticeable difference in volume and sustain, but it can be subtle.  I don't think I'd expect tremendous differences.  I'm not sure, but I think it might have to do with the weight of the pins (i.e.- total mass of the bridge is increased and that might be the reason for the improvements).  I certainly noticed an improvement when going from ABS plastic to wood in my Seagull.