Official Luthiers Forum!

Can you guys help me figure out what is so great about Mastery tuners? I have never owned a Jazzmaster, but from what I hear, the stock bridge from Fender sucks so bad that this cottage industry has sprung up around building boutique replacement bridges for these guitars. I may be wrong about that, but it does kinda seem that way.

But... if you do not have a jazzmaster, or a Fender with a similarly bad bridge, and you just have... say... a Les Paul with a Tun-o-matic, or a any other stop tail bridge system... would replacing it with a Mastery be worth the whopping price tag, or are Mastery bridges pretty much meant to be replacements for these offset Fenders with vibrato arms and a bridge design that can't stay in tune?

I've installed and setup two of them... And they didn't impress me at all.

I put them in the same ballpark as an Evertune bridge - ridiculously complex and overpriced bit of hardware that doesn't come close to the hype.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

I've put them on two Jazzmaster kits I've built, and set up two real Jazzmasters with them. I love them. I owned a Japanese Jazzmaster probably 15 years or so ago, and the strings would jump out of the saddle with any kind of aggressive attack. Not with the Mastery stuff. I've also always found offsets to be kind of buzzy and these definitely tighten the overall sound up quite a bit. Having said that, because I love them so much I bought a Tele bridge from them, after thinking about it for 15 minutes I quickly cancelled my order. I just can't see what they have to offer in that regard is really worth the extra money. Or maybe a better way to put it is, for the $165 plus shipping you would spend on one of their Tele bridges you'd get an amazing piece of hardware, but I'm pretty happy with the Gotoh In tune version I can get for $30 or whatever it ends up being at Allparts.

Yes.

We've installed many of them and they are very well made, much easier to adjust if you know how to properly set-up action and intonation AND most importantly what they are engineered to replace is utter crap making replacements desirable.

YMMV

PS the cool metal box is excellent to store your medical weed in.

The machine work is high quality. The intonation adjustments and height adjustments are a tad limiting in my opinion. I hate bridges with multiple saddles on the same adjustment. You'll never intonate one of these properly with a wound G string and lots of jazz players still prefer flatwounds with a wound 3rd. I have a client who plays a 60's JM out on tour and we tried a mastery bridge and it will not set up to the specs he needs.

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Brian

You never know what you are capable of until you actually try.

https://www.howardguitarsdelaware.com/

Wow. A jazz player who actually PLAYS a Jazzmaster. What's this cats name?

_________________
"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

He is currently playing some type of rock/blues with the "mad drummer" in Rick K and the Allnighters. He isn't using a wound third but needs a SRV type action and set up cause he regularly plows the high E almost off the bass side of the neck on bends.....(seriously amazing!) so the lack of individual string height adjustment is a problem as is the intonation.

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Brian

You never know what you are capable of until you actually try.

https://www.howardguitarsdelaware.com/

I have a client like that who plays like a troglodyte. Wears out his guitar on a yearly basis.

_________________
"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince