Personally I just don't think it matters that much. My best sounding basses have nuts made out of bakelite. The other electrics have some sort of synthetic. My upright has ebony.
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Why Don't MIA Fenders Come With Bone Nuts?
- Thread starter HiEnd Basses
- Start date
for a laugh, i once made a quicky nut for a guitar i was fixing out of the "worst" material i could think of, a big hunk of red rubber eraser.
sounded kinda thumpy on open notes of course, but fretted, i could tell no difference in tone or sustain.
if the stuff is hard enough to not drag on the string or wear out quickly, it's gonna be just fine on a bass.
my '96 american standard P has the stock fender "cyclovac" nut (just some kind of fancy plastic) and i've found no reason at all to change it.
Totally. If even the worst (solid) material imaginable turns out to not be that bad, seems like probably not that big a deal. As long as it can be shaped and filed correctly and doesn't dampen the strings, probably anything works.
Why don't we see wooden nuts on more basses? Do hardwoods (ebony, hard maple) just make it too costly?
i've seen plenty of roscoes with fancy wood nuts. they're neat and all, and usually very wide, giving more area for the string to rest on.
still, IMO they're probably in that "wears too quickly" category, especially with roundwound strings. i'd never choose one over bone or a harder synthetic.
when it's like one or two thousandths of height between "perfect action" and "my open notes are buzzing", i see no advantage in the softer materials.
Ahhhhh, okay. Didn't think of how roundwounds wear materials down more than flatwounds.
Since my upright bass (and I think other orchestral strings) have wooden nuts, I had wondered why it wasn't seen on bass guitars, and now I know... orchestral strings all have flatwounds.
see, from the other side of the street i wonder about that;
why don't we see bone orchestral string instrument nuts? maybe it makes the open notes too bright in comparison?
seems reasonable, since with guitars we're comparing open strings to strings stopped against metal frets, while with violin family stuff it's all just string against ebony, so an ebony nut makes sense.
Ya know what's not cheap? Time. The bench time of the luthiers you mentioned who told you bone is "a lot harder" to work with.
Riddle me this; If bone is so hard to work with, why spend any more bench time than necessary to save a little on the cost of an already inexpensive material?
As long as you don't let your stock get low, it's cheaper, my boss used to tell be keeping too much in stock is expensive, I can rough out profiled bars of corian, bone or carbon pretty quick and have more than enough laying around, I don't make a lot of instruments or really do a whole lot of repairs so it makes no difference to me. I can fashion a nut or saddle far cheaper and quicker than ordering them from the supplier. I've made Ebony nuts for ukulele, I even have a few made of Amber.
Bones not that hard to work with, and if your buying them the price is fairly competitive for one off projects. I can get cow tibia from my local butcher. My guitar player is getting ready to send his two year old bull down to the butcher, I'll have to mention it to him I could use the tibia, hate to waste anything. Not to freak out the vegetarians, around these parts the cows are safe, for the most part, but you can't really have a small heard with more than one bull. The lambs are a different story, kind of sad but really tasty "o)
Bones not that hard to work with, and if your buying them the price is fairly competitive for one off projects. I can get cow tibia from my local butcher. My guitar player is getting ready to send his two year old bull down to the butcher, I'll have to mention it to him I could use the tibia, hate to waste anything. Not to freak out the vegetarians, around these parts the cows are safe, for the most part, but you can't really have a small heard with more than one bull. The lambs are a different story, kind of sad but really tasty "o)
See hushnel's post. I might concede the point that bone is not as hard to work with as I'm making it sound, but when you're a luthier, you're dealing with a lot of odd sized nuts, and keeping a whole bunch of nut blanks that may or may not work in a particular axe without being reshaped isn't as practical for people who are practiced in working with those materials.
if Fender are keeping the same outlook on it as Leo, it's because of the cost
One thing I'll add, not all bone is the same density. If you are worried about life span and tone, density can make a real difference.
Nut making in bone generally dates from at least the 1400's. Lutes used an ivory nut until ivory became impractical and in many cases illegal to source. With regard to "orchestral string instruments", generally use of ebony is the tradition established by Amati who came up with the first known violins in 1542. Following the traditions of lute making, classical guitars have used bone since day one. You can't buy a handmade classical guitar that doesn't have a bone nut except those that substitute mammoth ivory, which is legal to use. Mammoth ivory though is going to cost you. I've made my own bone nuts for the last 10 years when I wanted to tweak the string spacing to my preference or refine the setup of string height at the nut. Making a nut from bone isn't hard but it is messy and the dust needs to be avoided. Unbleached bone is going to be somewhat harder than bleached but it's really a matter of preference. Beyond the varietal traditions instrument to instrument it doesn't really matter as only the open strings are affected and in blind tests, with classical guitars anyway, nobody could tell the difference between mammoth ivory, cow bone, Micarta or even plastic. Use what wears well. Many materials these day do.
Those nuts are made with a composite material with the trade name Dymondwood (we refer to it as "diamondwood"), which is significantly harder and more durable than bone, ivory, or even graphite (well really graphite impregnated delrin). I can attest from well over a decade of use, they don't wear down the slightest, even with stainless steel strings. There is nothing "soft" about a diamondwood nut, and while nothing will hold up indefinitely, this one is at least the equal of anything else we have access to.
i don't suppose you have a pic? is the stuff a solid color or is it layers of visible wood? it's been a while, and i recall seeing roscoes with a few different kinds of nuts over the years, even that pretty "grained ivoroid" stuff. (we carried roscoe for a good while, fantastic basses with the best low B i've heard yet.)
nah, it's not such a big deal to have a few handfuls of thicker and thinner nut and acoustic saddle blanks. by "blanks" i mean just flat rectangles of the material, no pre-shaping at all. grab one that's just a little bigger than the size you're looking for, proceed to sand it down and fit it.
if i had bigger power tools and more room in my shop then i might work off of hunks of "livestock leftovers", as it is the blanks do just fine.
i have started using a new generation of what appear to be CNC-cut nuts and saddles that are already shaped and starter-slotted; in the instances where they're the right spec, these do indeed save time while still being pretty cheap and good consistent bone. they still have to be sanded down, fitted, final nut slot depths cut and polished, but it does shave some time off the job.
Y'know, I don't really have a really good closeup shot of one...I will get one next time we have one finish with a diamondwood nut.
I've not heard of this anywhere else, is there a thread or news article confirming this, or do you have some insider knowledge you'd care to spill?
