The Chetboard

I have ordered one ,but generally don't do any work on my guitars myself. Is this easy to attach and adjust?

Yep, anyone can do it. Just loosen your strings and pull the stock bridge off the posts and slide the new one back onto the posts.
Alex

I get all the advantages of the Tru-arc with the wider spacing, i ordered one,, wise move? who knows, im a sucker for
sound hype... but wait,, you mean Gretsch cant get the 12 radius exactly right on the stock bridge??
that they should work on eh?
Rickr

Yeah, that never made any sense to me. I mean it's really not a difficult concept to match the fretboard radius...
Alex

Not all models of Gretsch have the same radius.

Tim Hrman has been selling these things for, I think, almost two years now and I think if they were hype we'd have heard about it by now. For some reason the tonal difference is instantly noticable to the guitar owners.

By all means, those of you who get them...please give us an evaluation...

I know that bridge materials can make a palpable difference. Harde materials tend to make a brighter sound while softer materials work in the opposite direction. I'm certain that there's much more to it because different metals have different chrystaline structure. I would imagine that tempered metals would be darker sounding than untempered metals, etc, etc. Anyhow, a good quality bridge matched to your fingerboard radius can only help and a solid bridge in place of an adjustable bridge will make a huge difference.

IMHO it's easy to get drowned in all the choices Tim offers. When thos things first came out Paul spoke very highly of them. I asked him what he suggested and he reccomended the brass one to me because it was closest to the stock bar bridge gretsch offered so that's what I got and I'm perfectly happy with it and have no curiosity about the other ones.

The main thing about the Tru Arc is no matter what material you choose your first benefit will be sustain and clarity of notes.
The matching of the fingerboard radius is supposed to make noting the guitar a little easier and more accurate. Those things will be audible (in a subconcious way) to your listeners (if you have any.)

Can't comment on different tones from different materials because to really be able to make a statement about that would require a day of switching the different compositions on the same guitar and it is not a scenario we are likely to experience any time soon.

For tonal color we have to depend, I guess, on Tim's descriptors or opinions of friends.

Craig Dobbins has clips of the various materials at
http://www.craigdobbins.com/tru-arc.html

I've been working very hard on The Yandell Project, getting all the material I gathered from Paul over the years.
One of the sections I'm currently calling "The Workbench" because it deals with a lot of his personal modifications.

Quite by chance I came up with several exchanges about the Tru Arcs Paul and I had when those bridges came out... Paul's words are in boldface
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The “Tru-Arc” bridge is an innovation by Tim Harman a journalist who posted at gretschpages.com as “Proteus”. He and his machinist brother developed a variant of the standard “bar bridge” that offered a variety of metals and, more importantly, were radiused to the fingerboard of the users guitar fingerboard. The two customizations improved the fingerboard action and increased sustained enough to impress Paul and other Gretsch professionals to buy and install them.

I put a copper model on my CGP. I think it is a little more mellow. The pickups in the CGP have quite a bit of highs. I put the aluminum one on my 1958 Country Gentleman it sounds great too. The old guitars had aluminum bridges.
__Paul Yandell cgp

I have a single cutaway Country Gentleman made in 1961 and I asked Paul to recommend one of those bridges for my guitar and he said
“If you get brass it will sound about the same as what you have but your guitar will play easier I think because of the radius match” thanks paul

I took his advice and he was right. No major tone change, easier to play and better sustain.

"low riders' are described in the spec sheet in a box on the left. Has to do with bridges on fixed posts as opposed to the movable ones. I think'SS' are the 'synchro series' also described on the left side of the page, also for the same kind of bridgepost mount.

Bigsby's work better on bridges that rock a little bit.