Gretsch Electromatic set up

This is the first Gretsch Electromatic I've had in the workshop... I think. I've had a Malcolm Young style instrument in before. But first impressions are - to put it succinctly - this: nice sounding Beatley instrument with too many knobs. And the widest headstock / string spread in the known guitar universe. But it is fun. It is an almost completely hollow body (it has a central support for the bridge and what feels like a reinforced strip down the middle of the guitar top) so it is acoustically very resonant and in a small room setting you can't separate that out from the amplified experience of the guitar very easily. On this guitar the plan was to replace the bridge with a roller bridge, fit an adjustable Tusq nut and check the switch for possible intermittent cut-out problems. Along with that, I made up some 'booster' pickup rings to lift the neck pickup closer to the strings (Rob's preference) and fitted new 9 strings. No major surprises - although I think the neck preferred 10s at the chosen low action on this guitar. The reason for this is simply that the less-taut 9s move more than 10s (particularly the wound strings) and as a result can't quite go to the same low action as 10s. It's another of those variables that has more impact on the set up than you'd at first think. My criticism about the width of the headstock is simple: the greater the string angle out of the back of the nut the more pressure the strings put on the nut slots. This has a negative impact both of increasing the friction of the string in the nut slot AND of increasing the risk of breaking the nut off - particularly at the high and low E. You'll recall seeing many an old archtop from the 1950s and 60s with the outside edges of the nut broken off at one E or the other. Fender got this part of the overall functionality of guitars dead right - and others, like PRS carried on the tradition for the same reasons. Gibson's headstock creates unnecessary string angles... but Gretsch's does it even worse. And there's no good reason for it - other than an arbitrary aesthetic preference. Thankfully, the Tusq nut handles these angles just fine - and the embedded PTFE ensures there is as little friction as possible given the physical limitations of the design. No 'String Butlers' needed here.