Gotoh 404BO B Bass Bridge

I really like the look of this bridge, I prefer the flatter chunkier style to the traditional Fender bridges that poke your hand with grub screws sticking up and saddles that can move side to side. It's got weight to it and it's well-built, feels high quality.

The five screw holes matched up with the ones from the traditional Fender stock bridge perfectly, mine are metric 17.5mm spacing, if you have a non-metric bass then this will likely not be suitable so check the technical drawings in the data sheet and measure before ordering.

The bridge has quick release slots for loading in the strings but I found that they had a tendency to flop out unless you keep tension on it when winding the string. This puts you in a slightly awkward position when putting on a string where you have to pull from the top and the bottom at the same time.

The main issue I had with this bridge was not being able to set the intonation correctly. Three out of four strings were too sharp at the 12th fret. This of course means that you must rotate the intonation machine screw clockwise, pulling the saddle back and making the string slightly longer. However the screws could not be turned any further even though the saddle still had 6 or 7mm left to go before hitting the end of the screw slot that keeps it from moving side to side.

To understand why, take a look at the saddle itself in the product photos. The screw doesn't go through the saddle like in many other bridges. This isn't necessarily an issue on its own, as long as the screw can still move the saddle backwards and forwards enough to be practical, but in this case each saddle can only move a total of 9mm! On other bridges the only limit is how long the screw is.

I think it might have been designed to sit a bit further back than a standard five hole Fender bridge on a 34" scale bass. That could also be the reason it has the two extra holes at the front. If you were thinking about picking up this bridge for a DIY bass project then I think it would be OK because you are in control of its placement but if you want to replace an existing bridge I would take a lot of measurements first.

A workaround would be to buy some shorter machine screws but it's a pain to source them. It would have been nicer if Gotoh included some spare screws of different lengths in the box. The bridge uses M3, 0.5mm thread pitch, pan head, Philips drive machine screws. The head diameter is 5.2mm and its height is 2mm. The thread length is 24mm on the E and A string saddles and 30mm on the D and G saddles.