Does hardware matter when it comes to guitar tone?

Tonewoods and amp settings are the first to be scrutinized, but should we look deeper for answers?

When it comes to guitar tone, players are quick to talk about tonewoods and amplifiers. But what about hardware? Is the biggest issue with a budget guitar, like a Squier or Harley Benton, its woods, or is the quality of its bridge, tuning pegs, and so on letting the side down?

Paul Reed Smith, the man behind PRS guitars – those axes with the marmite bird inlays – says he and his firm have done “a tremendous amount of research” into this theory. And he’s had a lot to say about it.

“In a lot of the past videos, I've stated that whatever the guitar string touches is God,” he says in a new YouTube video. “To exaggerate that, if the bridge is made of rubber, the nut is made of rubber, and the tuning pegs are made of rubber, the guitar is not going to have the kind of high-end that it would have if these things were made out of metal.”

Indeed, rubber bridge guitars have come into vogue in recent years thanks to the likes of Taylor Swift, Phoebe Bridgers, and Wilco adoring them. The rubber has a muting effect to the instrument’s sound, offering a more intimate sound that lends itself perfectly to breathy singer-songwriter types. It’s purposefully used to dampen the guitar’s sound.

The very nature of rubber means that vibrations caused by a player hitting the string, which is what ultimately creates sound, is absorbed. But it must be added that standard metal – or wooden on acoustic guitars – bridges are still used, to allow for some resonance. Using only rubber would be a non-starter.  

Metal does the opposite – it lets the strings sing. It accommodates those vibrations and aids sustain.

“One of the main goals with these parts is to not subtract from this beautiful sound the string's trying to make,” Smith details. “If you take a string and put it between two big steel vices and hit it, it rings. It’s got a nice, beautiful and musical high-end. It’s full of harmonic content, which I don’t want the guitar to shut down.”

“We've done a tremendous amount of research about how each of these [parts] operate on a mechanical engineering basis, but also what [they] sound like,” he continues. “Just in these tremolo bridges alone, the amount of time spent on the geometry of the curve of the saddle where the string leaves has gone through three or four iterations.

“It makes a difference [to] how much high-end the string has, how it works with the tremolo, and how it gets out of the way so the string can vibrate without sounding like a sitar.”

Living in a material world

There are, of course, arguments from some about how different bridges – whether they're string-through-body or wrap around set ups, for instance – affect tone. We're not going to wade into those waters here, but what we will put under the microscope is what the bridge is made of, and the role those materials play.

Different materials resonate differently. This affects your tone. Typically, bridge saddles are made from steel or brass, and there are clear differences between the two.

Steel, as a material, caters for a brighter, sharper tone. It puts emphasis on the high-mids and offers plenty of attack. Brass, meanwhile, is warmer, rounding out the attack’s sharpness, with more pronunciation in the low-end and high-treble frequencies. Granted, the difference isn’t always night and day, but it certainly influences the bigger picture.

So, if, like me, you’ve got a baritone Tele that you’re dropping to butt-wobblingly low tunings, swapping out brass for steel saddles might help eliminate some of the muddiness that can be created. It’s also a hell of a lot cheaper than changing the pickups.   

FU-Tones, meanwhile, believe their all-brass Stratocaster bridge – that's brass for its saddles, block, base plate and whammy bar – can breathe life into suffocated guitars.

“It amplifies the string vibrations, pushing it back into the guitar,” the firms says. “You're getting more of the guitar. It’s not like you're hearing the bridge, we’re just amplifying everything else you’ve already paid for.”

Sure, they're not going to market a product by slagging it off. Their quotes were always going to be laced with hyperbole, but the point remains: different materials contribute different qualities to a guitar's tone. Many could be counter acted with how you dial in your amp, or your tone control, but the hardware of a guitar shouldn't be completely overlooked in the quest for a tone that feels resolutely you. You don’t want to have to be compensating for issues earlier on in the chain.  

It's also worth noting that cheaper guitars often have lesser quality tuning pegs – what’s the point in a sick-sounding guitar if it never stays in tune? – while the nut material can also bolster, or hinder, tuning stability. The DNA of the guitar itself should be scrutinized long before you look to splurge silly money on a new amp in the hopes that 200 watts of tube amp thump will save your tone. 

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