Confused by bridge grounding

[solomon707]

My background is mechanical rather than electrical, so I'm having some trouble wrapping my head around the whole grounding thing. Basically what I want to know is a) will installing a colored/coated bridge (specifically black BAII) affect the bridge ground, and how would installing different pickups affect it?

[dmusic148]

Just scrape or sand the black coating from the back of the bridge, where it squeezes against the grounding wire.
The idea is that the strings pick up electrical noise from the environment, like radio antennas do, and this will be picked up by the pickups, unless you ground the strings through the bridge. This 'drains away' the noise.

[solomon707]

Awesome, thanks for the quick and concise reply.