Bunker Guitars, Individual Bridges

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Since their patent in the late 1950s, the Bunker Individual Bridges have gained notoriety with the endorsements of many famous bass guitarists.

The patents for Dave Bunker’s Individual Bridge Systems were prompted by the demands of Bunker’s innovative Touch Guitar which is a tapping style of instrument. The Touch Guitar required a quicker and more responsive tonal attack, plus its strings needed to be electronically separated. In order to use electronic string detection for his patented “Electronic Mute” Bunker’s individual bridge design enabled this separation.

With a conventional bridge, uncontrolled string vibration can create a noise problem as well as a loss of clarity. A string when plucked sends a circular motion of oscillation from the fret via the string to the intone piece of the bridge. For clarity of sound, the intone point of a guitar or bass must dampen as much of the oscillation as possible from flowing past it. But dampening that oscillation creates a new problem. With a conventional bridge, the more oscillating sound that is stopped the more that bridge will cross feed noise to the other commonly mounted intone pieces…and then they will oscillate in turn, creating after-tones that you really don’t want in your music.

When Dave Bunker first researched this problem, he confirmed the origins of the cross talk or errant noise. His remedy was to build multiple stand-alone bridges with individual intone pieces that would restrain nearby strings from oscillating. Tests using spectrum analyzers confirmed that if bridges were mounted individually, almost all cross talk could be eliminated. The better the tonal “stop” the greater the sound clarity. Where conventional bridges simply could not adequately dampen the vibration, Bunker’s unique, patented bridge system did, and the purity of tone was impressively retained.

Ultimately, Dave developed three unique bridges which he now incorporates into his high end Bunker Guitars:

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Top
Through Body

Bunker Individual Bass Bridges

Always forsaking the use of cheaper materials such as castings, aluminum, steel and plastics, Dave never compromised his deep commitment to using musically accepted bell brass for the bridges, which could be machined to precision tolerances for quality and a lifetime of use. Bunker’s individual bridges, materials and techniques have been further refined through the years.

Epilogue: Dave Bunker Bass Bridges

While Dave was president of PBC Guitar Technology and building American made guitars and basses on contract for Ibanez of Japan, Ibanez showed a curious interest in the Bunker individual bridges. After Dave completed his Ibanez contract, Ibanez tried building a facsimile bridge for their own off-shore guitars, but they were unable to attain the same high standards of sound found in the original Bunker bridges.

Others bass guitar companies have also made attempts to duplicate the Bunker Individual Bridge System but none have been able to reproduce the quality of Bunker’s original patents.

Today, after over 40 years of test proven reliability, the Bunker Individual Bridge System stands as the highest quality guitar and bass guitar bridge system in the world.