A bone saddle will drastically improve your guitar's tone and volume. This is a fine example of one of my hand carved and custom fitted compensated acoustic saddles. At my shop, these start out as a hunk of raw bone stock and are lovingly and carefully sanded to fit your guitar perfectly. In this case, I have carved a compensated contact point into the crown of this saddle that will better enable this guitar to play in tune. They are also a very pretty addition to a fine instrument.

For clients interested in adding pickups to their acoustic instruments, I have been recommending these rather than the standard under saddle piezo pickups. They have several big advantages. They Sound better because rather than pickup just the saddle and bridge, these pickup what your soundboard is doing. They also don't put a bunch of energy absorbing pickup material between the strings and your guitar and thus giving it more volume and clarity when payed acoustically.

There is no reason to compromise the tone of a fine instrument by playing with a plastic nut. A custom cut bone nut should provide excellent transfer of energy that will drastically improve the tone of your instrument. You may also find tuning easier and playing more comfortable. If you want your guitar to sound and play it's best, I highly recommend having it custom fitted with a nice bone nut.

These are sort of a specialty item offered at my shop. As a nylon string player myself, I know all too well the intonation issues that plague classical guitars. While these saddles do not perfectly intonate these instruments, they do help a great deal in making them play better in tune with themselves. To better understand what this saddle can do for you, please watch my video:

This is a good option for instruments with an older style 1/16" saddle slot where there isn't enough room to properly compensate or other cases where a player may not want a modern compensated saddle.

It's about way more than just how high the strings are. The way the guitar pays and how comfortable it is have to do with a number of factors including nut action, neck relief, string radius *and* string height. I carefully fine tune all these things when doing a pro setup. I often get asked if I can just adjust one thing or another but, doing so will not do the guitar or the player justice or fix playability problems. You have to look at the whole picture when it comes to playability.

This is an example of a 12 sting to baritone acoustic conversion I did for Seattle based musician Blake Noble. This was formerly a Cole Clark 12 string acoustic but Blake wanted something a bit different. Because of the invasive modifications involved, you should consider the decision to do this carefully but if you go for it, these sound great and a lot of fun to play!

I've got some answers. I started my career in luthiery working for Rainsong Graphite Guitars. I have a number of years of experience working with carbon fiber acoustics and am well familiar with the ins and outs of carbon fiber construction. They don't need work often, but when they do they should be taken to someone used to dealing with them. They are different and they do require some specialized knowledge. That is something you will find at my shop.