New Bone saddle for Taylor - MacNichol.com
 

Hi all - I have no affiliation with MacNichol.com but decided to try their bone saddle for Taylor guitars. I usually have used Bob Colosi saddles (also good).

The bone saddle from MacNichol looks almost identical to the Tusq saddle that come standard with Taylor guitars (in my case a 2013 522 model), only it is bone. Wonder if he uses some sort of CNC to build? The saddle took very minor sanding on the bass side edge to fit and very slight width sanding on the side that faces the neck. Slipped it in and WOW!! Very nice! Great articulation and sustain. And inexpensive! Actually took a lot less work than the Colosi saddle (no offense Bob C - your saddles are great).

Just thought I would pass this along to anyone considering a bone saddle upgrade for their Taylor. Here is the link to the bone saddle page. Pick the one specifically for Taylor guitars.

http://macnichol.com/catalog/accesso...guitar-saddles

MacNichol is my local store - they offer great, timely service. Highly recommend them!

Thanks for the heads up I just ordered one for my new 312ce.

Michael was kind enough to send me one of these high quality bone saddles to try on a Rainsong and they are a bargain at $15. :up:

Looks good. I was going to order one when I noticed the profile is different than the stock Taylor saddle. It is similar to the wave saddle, but not a direct copy. I'm sure most people will be happy with it, I just wanted to point out the profile will not be carbon copied like Colosi's are said to be. I am very picky about intonation so this stops me from ordering one.

Stock Tusq saddle on most Taylor's with only the B string compensated:
http://www.dreamguitars.com/products...ges/bridge.jpg

Wave fully compensated saddle, simliar to standard compensated saddles and looks like a close match to MacNichol's:
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7182/6...90b7e2ec14.jpg

MacNochol's saddle:
http://macnichol.com/sites/default/f...%20Front_0.jpg

Regardless of it's sonic merits I find it impressive how precisely MacNichol has machined the bone. I would have thought bone would be prone to chipping but obviously not.

Putting a real bone saddle in my Taylor 12 helped immensely. I don't know why in a fine guitar they use those plastic saddles. You lose a lot of grunt in the sound. Just left the stock Taylor nut on there though as the shape seems ideal -- probably would help to have a bone nut but just doing the saddle is well worth it.

Its because tusq is cheaper and apparently a lot of people either can't hear or barely hear the difference between tusq and bone. I would say its a smart business move to use the cheaper material when a significant portion of your customer base can't hear or care about the difference.

A large proportion of Taylor players plug and play through the under saddle pick-up ... there is a popular school of thought that TUSQ is a more consistent material than bone for transmitting sound to the UST pick-up. Also, it's cheaper ... ;)

If they can't hear the difference between the two then they aren't going hear the difference regardless if its amplified. It is more consistent in that you don't have to worry about getting a bad piece of tusq like you would have to worry about getting a bad piece of bone. However, if you are one that can hear the tonal difference and don't like the sound of tusq, its a bit of a moot point.

But in the end people will buy what they think sounds best, and I can't fault them for following their ears, psychosomatics excluded.