Well, I'm definitely interested - I mean, I am building a walnut-bodied guitar, with a maple+maple BOATneck, with STAINLESS steel 6100, and a Lawrence L500 pickup of some sort (I've got a variety) - it's not like I'm AFRAID of a little brightness here and there. :laughing8: :laughing7: :laughing11: :laughing3:
Now, there are a lot of (somewhat?) intelligent people out there who are willing to spend some money on sounding good, and so far, the 2Tek website does a pretty good job of avoiding insulting these people. There are two major categories of insult that we are barraged with in the guitar & bass realm, one is the aforementioned
"Get authentic VINTAGE TONE with our new space-age innovation!"
And the other is, of course, the popular
This Changes EVERYTHING! It's the
GAME-CHANGER! Every last thing you thought you'd ever learned about playing in the last 40 years is a BUNCH OF GARBAGE!
So, thanks for the restraint. Now, in looking at the thing (you can too!)
...at the thing, the first thing that strikes me, there is somewhere around 160 to over 200 lbs. of pressure pulling on those fingers, so the plate underneath on the bottom of the instrument must be plenty strong. Clearly the intent of it is to decouple the majority of the mass of each finger from the mass of the rest of the instrument, but if that bottom plate is rigid enough to hold all the fingers straight - how does it work, that the plate doesn't also cause the same degree of "crosstalk" as any other installation of a bridge/body combination? I could hazard a guess (based on the
proportional location of the mass), but I'm no engineer and it would be gobbledegook, even if it was a
true guess. As the 2Tek people must have done some research, it would be helpful if their site had a link to it.
In looking at the guitar bridge, it appears that the saddles can be interchanged with a number of different types, which is largely a good thing (though if you really attempt to go head-to-head with the fundamentalists of the "real telecaster" cult, forget it!). The 2Tek has channels for the saddle height adjustment screws, are they interchangeable with either the wide or narrow Graphtech saddles? In fact, what IS the E-to-E width?
In my direct experience, "crosstalk" is the single biggest source of mayhem with guitar synthesizers - can you use the piezo saddles of the Graphtech Hexpander or RMC Polydrive (Godin type)? This could EASILY become the biggest group of buyers of the guitar bridges, if you've made a substantial leap here.
And again on dimensions, we really need to know the exact height of the saddles at their lowest point above the surface of a 1.75" thick body, on the 2Tek site at least.
The performance enhancements of the 2TEK® Bridge comes from
individual string isolation...
...coupled with
maximum interaction between it and the natural resonance of the instrument body and neck materials.
?
1) Additional mass creates more punch.
2) 35% weight reduction since the original 2TEK Bridge design in the 90's
?
Sustain is measurable, or at least the difference in sustain between two different guitars of equal weight is. I would also guess that the 2Tek could cause a difference in the onset of notes, AKA "attack." Is that what "punch" means too?