Offset Bridge

The Mastery Bridge features precisely curved adjustable saddles that allow you to effortlessly set-up to any common fingerboard radius, from 7.25″ onward. Although guitar manufacturers will CNC radius fingerboards to certain specs, it’s the top of the fret that matters and should be measured, and that can change/vary overtime due to slight unevenness and eventual playing wear. Different climactic conditions can move the wood of your neck and not the frets, and depending on how malleable your fretwire is it will move or not move with it, causing slight unevenness. Varying string thickness will also affect the top of the string radius; depending on the thickness of your strings you’ll want to adjust to them accordingly. Heavy-handed players also like our adjustable saddle design because they can easily raise the bass side of the strings slightly for hard-hitting. The saddles eliminate annoying “buzzing” or rattle associated with previous single saddle bridge designs. Adjustable radius bridge saddles like ours are important for slight tweaking on first install and in the long run.

Plain brass, plain steel and plain stainless steel saddles eventually wear grooves into the saddle with vibrato use, which can cause muted tones and string breakage. Plain brass is the softest of these materials and can begin to wear within hours of vibrato use. The more surface area there is in a saddle groove, the more problems can arise later on. A steel string on an unfinished saddle naturally generates heat with heavy vibrato use, and that heat will expand the metal in your string and cause it to go out of tune. We use brass for our saddles, a softer, warmer-sounding metal, but plate them with a unique hard chrome plating not found on any other guitar bridge.

Hard chrome plating is commonly used to reduce friction and heat, along with increased wear resistance in parts like piston rings, firearms, airplane landing gear and bearing surfaces. It generates far less heat with vibrato use and your strings stay better in tune. Although much more expensive to manufacture than plain or “decorative chrome” saddles found on other bridges, our saddles’ unique hard chrome-plating aids in lubricity while tuning or actuating the vibrato of an Offset or Bigsby-equipped guitar, ensuring years of consistent performance and accuracy. No other bridge manufacturer uses plating this durable. Our saddles will remain the hardest surface on your guitar.

Unlike the floating design found on all other offset-style bridges on the market, where the only metal-to-metal contact between the bridge and the body is on the bottom tip of two mounting post adjustment screws, the patented mounting post design of the Mastery Bridge fits snugly into the diameter of vintage and modern Fender-style thimbles, creating full contact between the bridge/thimble/body. This ensures your bridge will not change position during performance and remain stable during string changes without any chance of misalignment. Along with our unique saddle design, this feature also has a dramatic effect on the transfer of string-to-body energy, giving your guitar much greater resonance you’ll even hear acoustically.

Since the installation of the stock body thimbles can slightly vary from guitar-to-guitar, we’ve made our posts adjustable and removable via a vented 6-32 button head screw. The patented head screw contains a hole (the “vent”), allowing internal access to the adjustable bass/treble height screws. Like all other parts of the Mastery Bridge, the posts and screws are stainless and will not corrode.

Our patented designed baseplate is CNC water-cut from a solid, 304 stainless non-ferrous steel sheet. We then tumble them in a coarse media to de-burr and break any sharp edges. The plate edges are then buffed on a wheel and hand straight-line sanded. After bending them to the specified profile, our logo and batch numbers are laser printed into the metal. Our patented baseplate and saddle design prevents the string from making contact with the back end of the baseplate and front and back of the intonation screw on Offset and Bigsby equipped guitars.

Our M1 Mastery Bridge fits all new, used and vintage American made Fender guitars. Our M2 Mastery Bridge is the same bridge as our M1, but comes with an additional set of larger mounting posts required for most Japanese made guitars. Our M1 Offset mounting posts fit USA spec thimbles that have a .310″ inside diameter. Our M2 Offset mounting posts fit MIJ spec thimbles that have a .315″ inside diameter. If you’re unsure which Offset bridge you need, click HERE.