Truckerdave, there's no problem with matching my volume to the guitar! But the 2 main open-mics I go to have really dire acoustics, so either you mic up or you look like you're miming. :-(

Thanks for the info, Rick and everyone. It's actually so severe that _any_ fingered chord sounds wrong when the strings are tuned correctly - you really do have to tune the guitar to the main chord in the key you're playing. Never mind 5th fret, we're talking G, C and D chords all over the place tuning-wise. Ah well, that's the answer anyway - guess I'd better get myself another biscuit and bridge then, and mess about until something sounds right. I'm not entirely incompetent with woodworking kit, so maybe I can get it to work. At least moving the bridge back slightly will help it out.

About a compensated bridge - will this not tend to twist the biscuit (and thereby twist the cone)? The strings leave the bridge to the tailpiece at a sharper angle than they arrive, so with the different angles of strings on each side of the bridge, this will give a resultant torque on the biscuit to try and pull the bridge back straight. Has anyone tried this before? Twisting the cone (which is fairly thin metal) sounds like a bad move...

Graham.