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Electric Guitars that are tricky to Set up


A lot of you gooroos know this already but for folks who don't, some electric guitars come with a tremolo (whammy bar) like this one. This guitar has a Floating Floyd Rose locking tremolo. It's one that locks at both the bridge and the headstock. At the bridge each string attaches to bridge saddles in an individual vice that is locked with an allen screw. All six strings have these. At the headstock there's also 3 little clamps that you tighten down with an allen wrench. So at both ends it's locked down. However you don't lock the strings down at the headstock until full set up is done. A floating tremolo can go up in pitch or down in pitch depending whether you pull whammy bar up or you push down on it. Unlike a tremolo that just moves down to lower the pitch, these go both directions. So this makes it twice as hard to set up compared to a one direction tremolo system. The string pull (tension) from the headstock to the bridge vs the tension from the pull of the springs in the back of the guitar, both have to be in balance so that when the whammy bar is released from being pulled up or pushed down it will always return to proper pitch. Before you make the other adjustments in a full set up of an electric guitar you have to go through this whole process. That is why is always costs more to have a guitar with this type system set up. For some styles of guitar like Steve Vai or Joe Satriani play, these are ideal and when they're set up properly it's quite awesome what you can do musically with them but the trade off is if you don't know what you are doing you will get super frustrated and possibly change or mess up the set up. It's a major learning curve for anyone! Anyways I got this one set up and it's playing great!


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Josh Isaacks
Josh Isaacks
18 sept. 2023

I blocked out my floyd rose recently because it was a pain to keep in tune, and I never used the whammy bar!


-Josh from Texas

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