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This was a new one for me - a customer specifically requesting that no animal products be used when working on their guitar, and wanting a recommendation on the best vegan material for a new nut.

It’s always bone nuts and saddles in my shop, my builds always use bone, and most repairs of involve me getting RID of man-made nut materials and upgrading to bone. This guy wants to go the other way.

I’d love to hear your favourite non-animal material for nuts and saddles. Micarta? Tusq? I’m not a huge fan of brass for nuts but could certainly go that way…

So did you tell him you use glue made of ground and cooked horse hooves?

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

Richlite?

Micarta would work fine too

We have never had this request and we operate in the People's Republic of Ann Arbor where we are over regulated beyond belief....

We do get requests to use ivory and we tell them we won't touch it. Now we have the other end of the spectrum.

There is NOTHING wrong with using cow bone for nuts when these animals have already been slaughtered and not making nuts of their femurs is not going to save a single cow. Sheesh, I would not work for someone who made this request, they are a big red flag to me.

PS: The very wood on the guitar was a living things once, do they want you to not use wood too?

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Ann Arbor Guitars

Maybe they don't want a bone nut in their Prius

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Ann Arbor Guitars

I guess for me Tusq would be an option. Their parts sound fine, I just hate working with them (like all of the man made nut and saddle options.) I find it unpredictable to work with, and before I know it I've cut a slot too low, or removed too much material.

Once in a while, a customer wants more maintenance/indulgence than what's available and nobody goes away happy. No telling what the next request is going to be.

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Peter Havriluk

An excellent point that is frequently forgotten. I would have reminded the client of that, and see what reaction resulted.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

Sometimes a person's just a vegan, and would prefer no animal products if its possible. Nothing seems unreasonable here, and in this case there's plenty of normal non-bone options that are used all the time. Even if the general feeling is that these aren't the most ideal options. If Josh's question got as far as this forum, chances are its because he's already decided his customer is worth dealing with, and simply wants suggestions on things he doesn't normally deal in.

Conor... we are allowed to make fun of our clients. I do it to their faces.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

Oh I get it. It can help keep us out of institutions...

I just thought there was getting to be a lot of making fun and not a lot of question answering.

For what its worth, I got a haircut the other day, and when I was trying to talk to my barber about what I was hoping for, he told me in a very annoyed straight face that he takes hair off, he can't put it back on. I shut up and let him do what he wanted.

At this point, I think the matter should be settled for the builder and the client. He wanted a vegan guitar, and the wood of the guitar is quite literally a dead plant. So the client needs to assess just how deeply his beliefs go before continuing the project. Will he compromise his stated ideals, or perhaps he's well funded and can afford something like an Emerald Guitar - made completely of carbon fiber in Ireland?

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

Assuming the guy is a player I would tell him it’s not a problem except for the nut, saddle and bridge pins. I’d just ask him what he has on his other guitars or give him a selection of the regular non-animal suspects and let him choose. Fortunately if he doesn’t like his choice they are all relatively easy to change.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Assuming the guy is a player I would tell him it’s not a problem except for the nut, saddle and bridge pins. I’d just ask him what he has on his other guitars or give him a selection of the regular non-animal suspects and let him choose. Fortunately if he doesn’t like his choice they are all relatively easy to change.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Vegan's only care about killing animals. They don't have any problems with killing plants.

Except my old neighbour who I could hear apologizing to all of the weeds in her garden as she pulled them out...

I simply wonder if the client is a sincere vegan, or is motivated by a fuzzy focus on "being a better person"? This is good stuff to discuss and consider - and not lightly. It's good to separate the chaff from the wheat once in awhile.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

Thanks everyone. I’d like to help this guy out, if I can … he seems generally easy to deal with outside this request and has a bit of an axe collection so he could become a regular if I keep him happy. I did give him my unvarnished opinion that these man-made materials are inferior to bone. Didn’t sway him.

He also might not be the last with this request either - it’s a bit of a hotspot for the alternative lifestyle/yoga/yippie types here - so it’d be good to have a small stock of non-animal nut/saddle material in case this comes up again.

Chris, I didn’t mention the hide glue

Hesh, I agree with your arguments that there’s no cows saved by eschewing bone nuts and saddles. But these kinda guys don’t care about that, they also refuse to wear leather shoes despite the fact that the steer has no further use for his skin, having already become a delicious prime rib…

I’ve ordered some tusq and micarta blanks to experiment with. Anyone used Corian? I know it’s polishable like bone … might be able to scrounge some from the local cabinet shop dumpster ..

I got some Corian scraps years ago from a local countertop shop. It cuts, shapes, and polishes just fine. But, it still sounds like plastic rather than bone. Way back when I was beginning at this, I did some A/B tests with it and bone. There was no contest. I use bone except when requested not to or when the instrument doesn’t deserve it. When I do a fretless instrument, I frequently use whatever the fingerboard is made of for the nut. In that application, the wood works just fine. I’ve never tried a wooden nut on a fretted instrument. That might be worth an experiment. After all, the nut, what ever it is made of, sits on wood. And, so does the saddle.

I restored an old parlor guitar that had an ebony nut. It didn’t sound too bad.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Gibson used Corian for a time. Seems like a reasonable material for a nut - vegan or not.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

This seems like a ridiculous and pointless request to me. That being said, it's also a request that is easily accommodated. As has been pointed out, TusQ, Micarta and Corian have all been used. I've used Corian myself (off-cuts from any counter maker) and while it does affect the tone ( once again, another personal interpretation) it is easy to work and comes in a myriad of colours to compliment your wood choices. Up to you, of course, but that part of the request is easily solved.

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Blue Ring Acoustics
blueringacoustics.ca

Bone is in our view the best material readily available for nuts. It's hard, it's durable, it's easily available, no animals were harmed specifically for this purpose, it's sustainable, it's tonally great and for us we can take nut slots very low improving the playability and intonation of what we work on and not be concerned that the thing will wear quickly and be too low and buzz.

I am making the case that bone is superior in utility and there is also the issue of any effort that needs to be expended sourcing other materials and all that BS.

If I had taken this call, we won't meet anyone in person until we have a phone conversation and get some things out of the way these days... I would have told them we use quality bone blanks and craft from scratch every single nut if you want something else go somewhere else. I would further state that we are busy as hell, only work for the general public about half the time these days we are so busy with the work we do for the professional musicians we service that we are not in the business of sourcing alternate materials for one-offs either. And further add that our very value proposition the materials that we use and don't use are all how we roll and that's not negotiable. Do you want a referral to someone else who's time you can waste?

Now this may sound like a hard line and perhaps it is but we have found in our considerable experience with over 1,100 guitars receiving service from us annually that we have some pretty hard fast rules for how we run our business. People come to us for our expertise, reputation, and fine work. We do not let people tell us how to do our jobs they are refused service if they do this. We also guarantee our work and our very ability to make these guarantees also is material dependent.

So this is BS, I would decline and get back to billable hours with a client who does appreciate that we have expertise that they don't.

And lastly I am not unsympathetic but this is not being green which I'm more than good with this is fanaticism...... and utter BS. My home is run my technology from alarms to the HVAC and smart speakers in every room. I have "leafs" currently displayed on the Google thermostat as I sit here cold and 65 trying to help and be green.... My car gets 39 mpg and that was important to me. Had the little Tesla not been butt ugly and looked like a Neon.... I would own one. I wanted one before I made the mistake of seeing one. I shop local and eat sustainable healthy foods. I want more renewable energy and vote with this in mind.

So I am sympathetic and practice what I preach but this guy is too far out even for a business that serves our very liberal/progressive area. Sheesh....

Oh, no animals were harmed as I wrote this post either....

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Ann Arbor Guitars

Totally understand where you are coming from Hesh.

At this point in my career, I’m probably the guy you’d refer the vegan guy to, whose time he can go waste

I posted about the question of vegan guitars over on the Seymour Duncan Forum... Got quite the spread of attitudes and responses - some mocking, some way too serious, and a couple who missed the point entirely. But by far - the comment getting the most "likes" was this one: "Can I order one with Seymour Duncan Meat Lovers Humbuckers installed?".

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

That is both a funny line … and also thought-provoking. I’m imagining the thick, beefy sound of the neck pup through a twin-rectifier..