Can I file my ghost saddle to achieve a different dimensions or string spacing?

Do not attempt to file the notches on Ghost saddles!!! The piezo crystal is only 0.040" below the notch, and if you expose the pickup, the string will short it out and it won't work anymore. Furthermore, the pickup has been positioned optimally in relation to the string, so it may change the pickup sensitivity if you file the notch deeper. This will affect the string balance when you file some notches and not others.

The saddle wires have 2 sides, which is which?

With our insulated Teflon wires (on all electric saddles) the blue side is ground and the silver side is signal. With our black shielded wires (on all acoustic saddles) the bare is ground and the white is signal.

How do I ground my acoustic guitar?

Our acoustic saddles are conductive; yet they do not short the piezo pickup due to the specific internal manufacturing.

Can I replace the saddles on my Line6 Variax with ghost saddles?

You can replace the LR Baggs saddles on your Strat-style Variax bridge with Graph Tech ghost saddles (PN-8000-00). These are made of String Saver composite material, and house pickups similar to the ones that came with your Variax. Unfortunately, at the present time we do not offer saddles that are compatible with the wraparound design.

Can I plug the pickup saddles from my Variax Line 6 into the ghost preamp?

The Variax saddles are electrically compatible with the ghost preamp and MIDI interface but Variax saddles lack the plug-in style connectors on our modular system. To overcome this, order the BE-0511-00 extension wiring harness, and solder wires from your Variax saddles to the pins on the harness. You will then have Variax saddles that plug into the ghost system.

Can I run both the Variax and the Hexpander off the same set of saddles?

Some Graph Tech customers have tried this with a simple Y-connection and found that the two electronic circuits interfere with each other if they're both powered on. If either is shut off, the other one works fine, so yes, you can run one or the other, but not both at the same time.

The difficulty with running two systems from two manufacturers off the same set of pickup saddles is that there may be loading, impedance mismatch, or other unpredictable interactions between the two electronic systems, when they share a common node at the connection to the pickup. There may be another way to do this, perhaps with some kind of buffer between the pickups and the circuits, but the solution remains undiscovered at this time.