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Ricardo -> RE: Richard Jernigan + How to tie a string (12-hole bridge) (Jul. 13 2026 14:28:58)
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cool video. I learned this with no math involved via experiment. He said he has not ever seen a guitar with "less than 6.3 degrees" of break angle, but I have. First of all, I thought this technique was invented to repair flamenco guitars that had a shifted neck such that over the years the action got stiff and there was no room to lower the bridge. I had a student with a used Conde like mine except his action was stiff, so he gave it to me and I naively sanded down the saddle enough to where I thought the feel would improve. I discovered a number of things. First of all, as much as I lowered it, the skinny strings like the D and maybe the first, ended up with a break angle of exactly 0.0. By that I mean the string went straight across the saddle into the tie block. When I played it there were two problems, 1. the string buzzed at the saddle if I played it hard as it was literally bouncing on the saddle, whether fretted or open, and 2. the intonation was off a bit. So I removed the saddle such that the strings were just going straight into the tie block and I was shocked that the guitar tone sounded just fine, bright and loud as before. The saddle or rather the break angle over the saddle was meaningless in other words. The transfer of sound was into the tie block. Of course this was not acceptable because the intonation was all off since the string was not being stopped at the saddle position.
So the reason this occurred I don't think was because of the neck, but rather the strings were all sitting high up in the tieblock holes. It seems they had been "sawed" upward by previous owners that had yanked on the strings to stretch them, and over time that lifted their relative position to the saddle and therefore decreased the required minimum break angle (I guess 6.3 degree is our minimum). I took the guitar to a local luthier and suggested this 12 hole fix, but instead he devised the fix that was pretty ingenious IMO. He filled the tieblock holes with wood dowels cut to fit. Glued those in. Then he redrilled new holes at a downward angle (from bridge toward the headstock) so that the entry point for the strings was some millimeters lower than previous. Then he sanded down the bridge a touch so a lower saddle would have exposure, and cut a new saddle that allowed quite nice action feel that still had room to go up or down relative to the bridge.
So the last thing I will say about 12-hole tie blocks is that the string tie itself, easily recognizable via the diagonal line, produces an asymmetry that bothers my eye. I prefer the aesthetics of the traditional string tie methods that are centered and perpendicular to the bridge...of course that is taste.
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