Hey Everyone,
On Tuesday next week, I'm going to be ordering some new parts online for my Gibson USA LP Studio guitar from a website called The Stratosphere, I'm going to be ordering some new nuts, tuners, TOM bridge hardware, pickup selector switch, and some new knobs, this time round I'm going to see if I can get a mate of mine to install the new nut for me cause the last few times I tried to install a new nut didn't exactly go according to plan, no matter how hard I tried to do a good job of it, the other parts I can install myself though.
I'm going to be ordering two bleached white and slotted bone-nuts, and two Tone Ninja Nuts for the LP Studio, I don't know which ones will prove to be the best fit for the nut trench so I'll have to wait till all the parts to arrive.
The Tone Ninja nuts are interesting, from what I've read online they appear to be made from a special polymer material which is self-lubricating, supposedly this means that I won't have to keep putting messy lubricants in the nut slots, I've tried using specially-made nut slot lubricants in the past with very limited results, I've also tried rubbing pencil lead in the slots too, didn't really work at all, so it'll be interesting to see if the Tone Ninja nuts live up to the manufacturer's claims.
I'm also going to be ordering some bleached-white bone nuts for my Fender USA Strat, as well as some Tone Ninja nuts for it too, the stock nut on the Fender Strat is a plastic one as far as I can determine, and I'm experiencing a couple of issues with it, firstly the B and high E-string seem to be binding in their nut slots, the B-string seems to be the worst offender cause it keeps wanting to go slightly sharp all the time when I use the trem-bar, secondly the high E-String seems to have a slight sitar-buzz to it when played open, I've traced the cause to the nut itself since the sitar-buzzing goes away when I fret just behind the first fret, the first fret action looks fine to me as far as I'm concerned, incidentally, I tried putting some lubricant into the B and high E-String nut slots and noticed that it deadened the B and high E-strings a bit, so there's all the more reason to suspect the nut as being at fault, I'm un-decided as to whether I'll install a new bone-nut or a Tone Ninja nut, again I'll have to wait till the parts arrive in the post.
Here's a webpage article I just found:
http://www.addictedtogear.com/articles/that-nutty-tone
There's another reason I am very strongly suspecting the stock nut on my Fender Strat is causing the issue with the B and E-strings, I noticed occasionally, when I did a dive bomb with the Strat's trem-bar without the Strat plugged into an amp, that a slight pinging-sound came from the headstock end of the neck, I also noticed that if I pushed down on the B-string behind the nut the B-string would go sharp, gently pulling the B-string away from the fretboard would bring the B-string back to pitch, so yes I think the B-string is binding in it's nut slot for sure.