JBE Pickups (Barden) Vintage Tele Bridgeplate and Saddle Kit Nickel

Easy installation! Much to my surprise all I had to do was adjust the string height on a couple of barrels...the intonation was right on. Looks good,sounds good,is good!

....added tone to my telecaster and also tuning is better.

The Joe Barden vintage bridge kit is a fine looking and beefy bride for any telecaster, really top of the line. It's made with solid materials, and has a good price tag for a bridge of this quality. The construction of the plate with the little finger notch is excellent as I always seem to hit that area, this feature eases playability for many of us. The only thing I didn't like about this bridge is the lack of string grooves on the saddles. The top two strings, and sometimes the G string, wouldn't stay in place and wanted to slide and walk over and rest on top of the adjustment holes which impeded saddle adjustment and caused some unwanted pinginess while playing at times. I tried filing mini grooves in the saddle for my top 2 strings and it didn't really help. To correct the issues I ultimately had to remove the stock JB brass saddles and install a set of Graph Tech 3 piece saddles and that solved my string issues completely. The Graph Techs fit in nicely with no issues. The JB Vintage Bridge is a crazy good upgrade for your Tele but I can only give it 4 stars. Any less than 4 stars would just be hatin'. You may not experience the issue that I had with this bridge at all give this product a higher rating. Thanks Guitar Center.

Ordered the Barden bridge for my American Special Tele. What a difference. Sounds so much better. You'd think that I upgraded to an American Deluxe or something. Probably a little longer sustain, never timed the sustain with the original, but the sustain just feels longer. The luthier that installed it for me told me that the intonation was easily set and is smack dab on. The barden bridge is so nice and looks great. The bridge has such a nice chrome polish, whereas the stock original is dull and lackluster. The only downside is that when people take pictures of you playing on stage, the shiny chrome polish might cause glare in the picture. (oh darn) The barden bridge is so much more heavy duty, it probably weighs twice what the original bridge weighed. The factory original bridge feels like a cheap piece of tin in comparison to the barden bridge. The cutout in way of the high E string which they say makes it easier to fingerpick, I won't vouch for that because I do very little finger picking. Another thing, the barden bridge is ever so slightly larger and hides the routing in the wood for the bridge pickup better than the original factory bridge. So.......... Don't feel like shelling out $120 to $150 for a new set of pickups, not to forget the $100 to have the pickups installed; well try out the barden bridge for a quick bolt on immediate improvement in sound. You could probably install this thing by yourself, but might be better to just have a pro install it for you so they can get the intonation and saddle heights perfect. PS: Thanks to Zach at Frets in Westerly RI for the great work with installing the Barden Bridge or me.

I bought an FSR Vintage Telecaster recently. I wanted that vintage tele sound. Love the guitar but did not like the intonation problem acustom to the vintage brass saddles. Installed the Joe Barden tailpiece. Unit dropped in, no problems. Intonation was about perfect out of the box, just adjusted the string height and was ready to go. I Still have that tele sound with no intonation problems. Added locking tuners, now I have a Sweet Sounding Vintage Tele.