T-Bridge Acoustic Tune-O-Matic Bridge Pickup Chrome

That great Baggs acoustic tone is also available in a beautiful tune-o-matic-style bridge. Each saddle contains a miniature high-output pickup. These six pickups can either be combined or can be used discretely for a hexaphonic output. It also works with the Ctrl-X for acoustic or electric sounds at the flip of a switch.

Imagine one guitar that is perfect for blues or rock and roll, has the ultimate clean sound, is great for jazz and has a great acoustic sound without feedback. Sounds like an expensive dream, but chances are that you already own this guitar. And all that it has been waiting for to unleash this hidden potential is the vibraton bridge pickup, the T-Bridge Acoustic Tune-O-Matic Bridge Pickup from L.R. Baggs.

When L.R. Baggs decided to apply their 15 years of transducer design experience to amplifying the electric guitar, they were faced with the task of first choosing a guitar and then a bridge. But when they interviewed guitar makers about bridges, they found that there was no existing bridge that had the qualities that they were looking for. So they designed their own. By starting with a clean slate, L.R. Baggs did not have to shoehorn their pickups into an off-the-shelf bridge. They could then design the tune-o-matic bridge and pickups as an integrated system without compromise. The product of their research, the Tune-O-Matic X-Bridge is beautiful, responsive and dynamic, and has a jaw-dropping sound that redefines what an electric guitar can do.

The T-Bridge can fit onto many popular guitars equipped with tune-o-matic-style bridges without the need for serious modification to the instrument. It requires approximately .120" to .200" of clearance below the bottom surface of the bridge for the wires.

Installation instructions
1. Drill a 5/16" hole for the wires from directly beneath the center of the bridge into the electronics cavity. In some cases you can angle the hole directly towards the cavity, although you must be careful not to intersect the post hole. If you can not drill a straight hole without running into the post, another option is to drill a hole into the magnetic pickup cavity and from there into the electronics cavity; in most cases there is enough room inside the pickup cavity for the wires.

2. Bundle the wires together and feed them into the electronics cavity.

3. A circuit board is provided with this bridge for the purpose of summing together the six pickups into one single mono output. These pickups may also be used hexaphonically, but this use is not described in these instructions.

4. Solder the inner wires of the coaxial cables to the round solder pads on the circuit board and the braided wires to the square pads as shown in figure 1. You may need to strip the ends of the wires so they line up with the solder pads on the summing board before soldering.

5. To eliminate hum you must shield the circuit board. Peel off one side of the backing from the insulating tape and cover all of the signal/hot connections with it. Next, peel the backing from the copper shielding tape and lay it over the insulating tape with the edges touching the ground pad on three sides; then solder those three edges of the copper tape to the ground pad as shown in figure 3. It's a good idea to insulate the bare coax wires that are loose inside the cavity with electrical tape or similar material to avoid shorting something out.

6. Secure the summing board by applying the double-sided white foam adhesive to the back side of the board and then sticking it to a clean, flat surface inside the cavity.

7. For the final connection you may connect your bridge passively in stereo as shown in figure 4. This will provide a separate volume control for the T-Bridge on the ring contact of the stereo jack while leaving all the magnetic pickup functions as they are currently on the tip of the stereo jack. To be able to blend the T-Bridge signal with the magnetic pickups in mono, the bridge can be connected using our Ctrl-X active preamp.

Other special installation notes:
1. Solder the white wire from the mini toggle together with the output wire from the guitar's 3-way switch.
2. Solder the red wire from the output jack together with the 2 orange wires on the Control-X.
3. If you wish to replace one of the tone pots with the Control-X and combine both mag pickups onto the one tone pot, just run a wire from the clockwise lugs on the volume pots to the counter clockwise lug on the tone pot.