MASTERY BRIDGE M4.1 – Tele w/ Chrome Plated Brass Saddles for Bigsby Mastery

Made especially for Bigsby B5 users that have a standard Tele (4) wood screw vintage footprint. Strings glide smoothly over our patented hard chrome-plated brass saddles without pinching. Includes four 18-8 stainless steel oval #6 screws.

Thousands have experienced the sonic benefits our patented saddle system has made to their Offset series Fender guitars. With around 50 lbs of string pressure bearing down on two saddles, string energy is utilized unlike any other bridge available. Now, Standard Tele owners can experience the Mastery Bridge difference. Hear what it does for yourself.

The patented Mastery Bridge is crafted and assembled in Minneapolis, MN, using the finest materials available. Each individual bridge is inspected and tested on a guitar before being shipped to you, to ensure the best possible performance. Every part of our bridge is made of the highest quality, non-corrosive materials to protect against any rust. Because we are currently such a small shop, the Mastery Bridge is only available through this website and is not available through any other online source or retailer. Please look over the descriptions of the various parts that go into the Mastery Bridge below. Easy step-by-step installation instructions for our original offset bridge can be found here.

Hard Chrome Plated Saddles

Plain-steel and stainless-steel saddles eventually wear grooves into the saddle with vibrato use and can cause string breakage. A steel string on a steel saddle generates heat with heavy vibrato use, and that heat will expand the metal in your string and cause it to go out of tune. We use brass for our saddles, a softer, warmer-sounding metal, but plate them with a unique hard chrome plating not found on any other guitar bridge.
Hard chrome plating is commonly used to reduce friction and increase wear resistance in parts like piston rings, hydraulic cylinders and bearing surfaces. It generates far less heat with vibrato use and your strings stay better in tune. Although much more expensive to manufacture than plain steel or “decorative chrome” found on other bridges, our saddles’ unique hard chrome-plating aids in lubricity while tuning or actuating the vibrato of an Offset or Bigsby-equipped guitar, ensuring years of consistent performance and accuracy. No other bridge manufacturer uses a plating this durable.

Hardware

All of the screws on our bridges are made from either 18-8 or 316 solid stainless steel. The springs are made from 302 solid stainless steel.
Absolutely no nylon plastic parts are used as components on our bridge.

Mastery Saddles

The multi-patented Mastery Bridge features a unique saddle design not found on any previous guitar bridge. On the 52mm string spacing from E to E, four intonation-adjustment screws are used instead of six, allowing the string to freely go from the saddle to the vibrato without any chance of interference from the front of an intonation screw or back of a baseplate. Each saddle features two drop-in stainless swivels, permitting each of the individual intonation adjustment screws to work independently for precise intonation. The deep saddle string grooves ensure that your strings will never “pop-out” during performance and are slightly fanned out on each end. Instead of around 18 lbs of string tension bearing down on an individual saddle as found on most bridges, our bridge applies over 50 lbs of downward string tension on each saddle. This added tension forced downward transfers more string-to-body energy, which you’ll hear in your guitar acoustically as well as amplified. The saddles accommodate the heavy-gauge strings of Bass VI model guitars and can be used on left-handed guitars as easily as right-handed.

Adjustable

The Mastery Bridge features precisely-curved adjustable saddles that allow you to effortlessly set-up to any common fingerboard radius, from 7.25″ onward. Although guitar manufacturers will CNC radius fingerboards to certain specs, it’s the top of the fret that matters and should be measured, and that can change/vary overtime due to slight unevenness and eventual playing wear. Different climactic conditions can move the wood of your neck and not the frets, and depending on how malleable your fretwire is it will move or not move with it, causing slight unevenness. Varying string thickness will also affect the top of the string radius; depending on the thickness of your strings you’ll want to adjust to them accordingly. Heavy-handed players also like our adjustable saddle design because they can easily raise the bass side of the strings slightly for hard-hitting. The saddles eliminate annoying “buzzing” or rattle associated with previous single saddle bridge designs. An adjustable saddle bridge like ours is important for slight tweaking on first install and in the long run.

Tele Baseplate

Our Tele baseplate is CNC water-cut from a solid 304 stainless steel sheet and stamped with our tooling to the specified profile. Our pickup cavity is undersized in tooling and then CNC’d to spec, thus eliminating any unwanted “flange” on the backside and creating a solid, flat surface. Each one is then tumbled to de-burr and break any sharp edges. Our logo is CNC engraved, followed by a series of hand straight-line sanding and bead-blasting. The area above the pickup is buffed to a mirror finish. Our baseplates blend well aesthetically on both vintage and new guitars and are intended for Telecasters with a (4) hole vintage footprint.
Please note: We currently do not offer American Standard or other style baseplates for the Tele Mastery Bridge. We do not offer the Offset Bridge with brass saddles and do not sell saddles individually. Brass saddles on any bridge will succumb to string wear over time and our brass saddle option Tele bridge (M3) is not warrantied against this sort of natural wear.

Our Tele saddles are the same as above, but with the bridge option of either electroplated brass saddles and swivels (M3 Bridge) or hard chrome-plated brass and stainless steel swivels (M4 Bridge).

NOTE: Not compatible with Tele Vibramate Bigsby Bridges.