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<< back to reviews KTS Titanium saddles review By Fred Heghammar UGG. 
The first time a came in contact with Titanium, were when I worked as a Jet engine mechanics at SAS. Titanium is a very common material in the air craft business, mainly for it being light weight and VERY strong. I remember I had some thoughts about building a guitar in that material for it is an outstanding acoustic piece of metal, something I noticed when I had to mark a Titanium ring with an engraving pen. What a noise, man it sounded like someone killed 1000 pigs at the same time! What a sound!
A couple of years later I saw the first Titanium guitar parts in the local music stores, but no one never tried them and neither did I. I think people including me are a bit afraid to try new stuff on their guitars, especialy the vintage gear freaks.
A couple of month ago we got an email from Mr. Hiroshi Masuda from KTS, a company who build guitar bridge and saddles in Titanium. Mr Hiroshi who is a VERY nice guy told me about their products and once again I was curious to try them out. And this time I felt I had the strength to take the step and try them out. KTS is based in Japan and this is how KTS describe the material they are using in their products. Titanium (which symbol is "Ti" ) is a light, lustrous, silver-white, and very corrosion-resistant metal. It was named after "Titan" in Greek myths (any of family of giants who ruled the world before gods of Mount Olympus). The specific gravity is 60% of iron and the strength is almost same as steel. The corrosion-resistance is superior to stainless steel and it is almost same as platinum for salt water. The strong and light feature of titanium is used for aircraft manufacturing and space science as important structural material and the corrosion-resistant feature is used for many equipment of chemical industry, which requires severe environmental operation. Many people believe "Titanium is hard." However, high purity titanium is rather softer and in fact the hardness is almost same as stainless steel. We use this high purity titanium for Custom Titanium Guitar Parts. The low internal damping factor of titanium is one of the most important features as good sounding metal. In another words, the most of wave motion created by strings vibration can be transferred to the guitar body without absorbing by the metal material. This happens because of unique hexagonal close-packed crystallization structure of titanium. Also, this characteristic of titanium stabilizes strings vibration. In addition, the metal which has less ratio of "E (traverse coefficient) / p (density)" is usually better for material to be used as audio equipment parts. In simpler wording, the light metal that is hard to bend is better material for audio parts. Titanium is the one of this feature. Read more technical information at www.k-t-s.com. 
Do you dare to feel the difference?We got some samples to try on our guitars, one set of Tele compensated saddles and one set of Gibson Les Paul saddles. The products were very easy to mount except one step...you have to make your own grooves into the Les Paul saddles, I must tell you that it isn't that easy if you don't have the right tools, I didn't :-( When the saddles were mounted and there were time to adjust the guitar, I immediately noticed the improvement this product gave my guitars. The tone where much stronger and more stable and it made the adjustment really easy to do. To start with I must tell you that I was very happy with my guitars (Fender Telecaster -67, and a Gibson Les Paul Classic) as they were before I mounted the saddles, but the KTS Titanium saddles really put the whole package on another level. The KTS saddles gave me more of everything I liked with my guitars! Lovely acoustic tone, with great chime and much better strength and stability on every note. I like the way a guitar sound when you have just mounted new strings on it, the first 10 notes you hit is lovely in my ears, and then something happens to the sound, the string gets tired. With the KTS Titanium saddles, you got this sound much longer, even when the strings are starting to get tired, the saddles makes them sing much longer and better. The guitar feels more alive and its much easier to play. I use Komet amps, which is VERY touch responding and the KTS saddles make the respond even better! I had both my guitars an the Scandinavian guitar show recently and everyone that tryed the guitars really liked the sound and feel, and the strings sounded good trough out the whole show. We can really recommend you to try the KTS Titanium saddles on your guitars, do you dare to feel the difference? The worse thing that could happen is that you get a better guitar :-) You find KTS Titanium Products at www.k-t-s.com Fred << back to reviews |