Ok, you two seem to know your stuff when it comes to saddle materials and nut materials - what are your thoughts on graphite?
I just swapped the bridge on my Strat from a Fender American Standard bridge with GraphTech saddles to a Gotoh Wilkinson with steel saddles. Obviously there are a LOT of other factors in play here, but even before I set it to float the tone seemed to change noticeably, particularly in the attack - the old bridge seemed a bit more muted in the attack, with fewer of the bell-like overtones that make Strats so cool in the first place.
Now, I know so far this seems like a stupid question, because regardless of WHY I'm digging the guitar more now (be it placebo "new gear" effect, be it just a bridge I find more comfortable, be it a different sustain block, whatever), what fundamentally matters is the fact that I dig the tone more, or at the VERY least think I do. However, I'm asking because I'm still running a graphite nut - I switched over from whatever's stock on a Fender to graphite because my old bridge just wouldn't hold tune if I even touched the bar. Even the graphite nut wasn't so good... For some reason however when I switched from the Fender to the Wilkinson bridge, tuning stability improved from "dive and the G string is a quarter step sharp" to "nearly perfect even after pretty extreme trem use."
So, I'm wondering if what I'm hearing is due from the change from graphite to steel, and if so if maybe enough of my tuning stability issues were (somehow) due to the bridge that it might be worth my while to try a nut that might sound better.
I could just cough up the $20-30 or whatever it'd cost me to buy a new nut and pay someone to cut it/install it (I don't have the tools, and while I could probably work it out I've owned this guitar for about ten years now and am WAY too attached to it to try something that I'm not sure I can pull off - a bridge swap is one thing, but this strikes me as a little more invasive...), but that'd involve sending it into the shop for a couple days, and ever since I threw this new bridge on I haven't been able to put this guitar down. It's like rediscovering an old friend...