2000s Epiphone Les Paul Junior Sitar-Saddles Mod Electric Guitar

A consignment customer sent this LP Jr along as a freebie some time back and I decided to turn it into yet another Epi cheapo-LP-series recording buddy by whipping-up some sitar-sounding saddles for it. The final product (at the moment) is ugly because it's an experiment but it gets the job done and plays in tune up and down the neck (I really wanted to be able to capo to get into different keys easily).

The major considerations when trying to get a good sitar-sounding effect from the saddles are to have at least about 1/2" of shallow slope dropping down going towards the neck from where the string makes contact on the back of the saddle, though the angle of the slope will be different for each string, so I used a  fast-cutting flat file to make adjustments until I got that slope right for each string. Once I got the slope right, I set intonation by filing a steeper slope at the front of the saddle until the "drop off point" alteration let the string play in tune up at the 12th fret.

If I had to do this again, I would probably just make a 1-piece, radiused block of rosewood that I then hand-filed to fine-tune and set intonation rather than 6 individual saddles that I thought would be more efficient to "lock into place" at the right compensation point. Oh well, we live and learn!

I did find that a less-extreme back angle from the "tailpiece" to the back of the saddles helped a lot, for whatever reason, even though many sitars have extreme break-angles on the back of their bridges. I was lucky-enough to have a random "string-spreader" bridge/tailpiece off an SX lap steel to use for that job.

Lastly, to give it a "sitar-sounding" tuning, I've tuned it CGCGCG low to high with loosey-goosey strings, keeping a modal C-tuning thing  going.