SE Standard's nut material is?

[NostraHistoria]

Good to hear. The local guitar shop told me to get TUSQ instead of bone. I am very satisfied with it ever since, although I thought that the same nut was in my strat.

I put it in myself too. It was easy. Just watch a few YT videos and you got it. When I got the hammer out, I probably struck it only about three times or so. I am glad I did it myself. It would have been 30 or 50 at GC to do it.

 

[Rockula]

My intuition is that you probably can't beat the tone from a bone nut. But, bone is very heard to work with if you're a novice. You could spend considerable time learning the skills to cut a good one yourself. I'm also not sure how well it works with trem. I have a '66 Jazzmaster that is rock solid for tuning stability. I think the nut may be bone, but I'm not sure. That's why I went with the TUSQ nut for my SE. Inexpensive, and very easy to work.

There is one small gotcha to watch out for. I also put TUSQ nuts on a couple of other guitars. I kept getting an annoying buzz out of the B string on one guitar. I was afraid I had sanded off too much from the bottom of the nut, but it turned out to be a tiny bit of excess material that was left over in the B slot from the molding process. Once I figured that out, I decided to pass a file through each of the pre-molded slots on each TUSQ nut before installing it. No problems after that