locking tuners + non-locking trem-- how well does this work?

[Zaphod B]

Right, I understand.

Mine has three Golds in the SSS configuration and sounds good. Nice glassy sounds and the pickups are well-balanced. It's just not very good at pushing a tube amp - not as well as a HB-equipped guitar, anyway. A little boost in the signal chain takes care of that.

 

[ggunn]

Real Strat players grease their nuts. ;^)

 

[DrewPeterson7]

I have a half-blocked Wilkinson vibrato on my Xaviere Strat-Like-Guitar (XV-850?). You can't pull notes sharp with it; you can only go flat. With no locking tuners and a standard nut, it's pretty stable, too, unless you divebomb it. Even then, coming back from a whammy-bar-flat-on-the-body dive, it's not too bad.

Zap, we probably have pretty similar guitars - I've got a '91 American Standard with a graphite nut, 3 Gold Lace Sensors, and a floating Wilkinson that can get about a step of pull on the G string.

My experience is pretty similar to yours - for a guitar that I never even bothered inserting the bar with the original trem because it wouldn't hold tune worth a damn, the Wilkinson is essentially perfect (I'm sure a tuner would show a cent or two here and there) for subtle to moderate bar work, and still pretty damned good for full-on dives.

Likewise, the Gold Lace's sound convincingly stratty and are dead quiet. They're not too hot, true, but with a Mesa Rectoverb gain sort of is a non-issue, and unlike "traditional" pickups, they have almost zero magnetic pull, so if you really want to get the output up, you can run them all the way up until they're almost touching the strings, and your intonation won't suffer (though, I run them lower for more picking hand clearance).

 

[Lee Mellon]

Tuning method

I've got two American Strats, neither of which have locking tuning systems.

I've found that the key to keeping your strings from slipping out of tune is to stretch them when you re-string your guitar. When you're threading the strings through the tuning pegs, leave enough slack to fit four fingers in between the fretboard and the string you're working on.

Once you've wound all your strings and they're in tune, spend an extra fifteen minutes or so tugging on the strings and re-tuning them--Don't tug so hard that you snap them, obviously.

It takes a bit longer but it tends to create less situations in which you're fumbling around with bad tuning, and it lengthens the lives of your strings as well.

 

[DrewPeterson7]

I've got two American Strats, neither of which have locking tuning systems.

I've found that the key to keeping your strings from slipping out of tune is to stretch them when you re-string your guitar. When you're threading the strings through the tuning pegs, leave enough slack to fit four fingers in between the fretboard and the string you're working on.

Once you've wound all your strings and they're in tune, spend an extra fifteen minutes or so tugging on the strings and re-tuning them--Don't tug so hard that you snap them, obviously.

It takes a bit longer but it tends to create less situations in which you're fumbling around with bad tuning, and it lengthens the lives of your strings as well.

That's generally good advice, but it'll only get you so far - even with pefectly stretched out strings, if you're running a non-locking trem then you have to worry about strings shifting in the trem block and strings binding at the nut.

I mean, the only thing I changed when I pulled the USA Standard trem off my strat was replacing the trem with a Wilkinson. Same non-locking tuners, same graphite nut, same guitar. Yet, the trem went from nearly unusable to almost perfectly stable. It's worth noting that several years before I'd replaced the trem block after snapping a bar, so maybe it was just a shitty block, but either way something was funky with that bridge, and it was seriously impacting my tuning stability in ways the Wilkinson doesn't.

 

[Lee Mellon]

Yea,
you're absolutely right. I guess that advice came from the fact that I am very conservative with my trem-use. I really only break it out when I'm going for a David Gilmour, elegant kind of tremelo sound. Truthfully, I've never really devoted much time to the whammy.

One of my favorite guitar players, Nels Cline (Wilco), uses it quite a bit to accent hammer-ons, and he plays mostly on an ooooooold jazzmaster. So I know he's not using locking tuners. I have always wondered how he gets away with it on stage. I've always just attributed it to first-rate tuning jobs.

 

[ermghoti]

If you're talking about holding the string four fingers' height off the fretboard, that is waaaaaay too much wrapping. You optimally want about 1-1/2 to 2-1/2 wraps around the post.

 

[dogonjon]

Joke

Hendrix tuned on the fly because he used guitars which went out of tune with the abuse but were still pretty much top of the range at the time.

Hendrix would probably be playing Parker Fly guitars and modelling amps if he was alive today, he was using cutting edge stuff back then, why not now... yes with locking tuners and locking trems and still with a more open mind than yours.

I mock you.