Strats

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peopleperson

peopleperson

I'm so sorry.
Im looking to possibly buy another Strat for myself. I have one already with a Floyd Rose on it because Im one of those whammy obsessed players and I need the locking nut to stay in tune, but my question is, how the hell do certain players do their whammy thing and stay in tune anyway? Hendrix did it, Adrian Belew does it.....
 
Listen to Hendrix again. He did not stay in tune.

Adrian Belew uses a Kahler trem, which was the major competitor with the Floyd Rose back in the eighties (not a very successful competitor, it would seem, as they have been making golf clubs for the last 3-4 years).

The trick to keeping non-locking trems in tune is not to just let go of them when you use them. You need to return them to the zero possition.

Or at least, that is what I learned from reading the Eddie Van Halen articles back before he had a Floyd Rose (the first one ever made, by the way). The only trem I have is a Floyd.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
peopleperson said:
Im looking to possibly buy another Strat for myself. I have one already with a Floyd Rose on it because Im one of those whammy obsessed players and I need the locking nut to stay in tune, but my question is, how the hell do certain players do their whammy thing and stay in tune anyway? Hendrix did it, Adrian Belew does it.....
Click to expand...

Ritchie Blackmore is almost always in tune after some whammy work. I have used the same technique for years also. After you return the bar to zero, you have to (really quickly) pull all the strings to get them back to their position. What actually happens is that some strings get stuck on the nut and sound sharp. A quick tug on all the strings fixes it. No amount of lube or fancy graphite nuts will fix this 100%. Another way to minimize this is to try to whammy using a bar chord and muting all but the note you want to bend. This stops some of the lost tensioin and hanging up of the strings on the nut.
This all take a lot of practice until it becomes second nature.
 
my trick...

sperzel or schaller type locking tuners, LSR roller nut, quality setup....commence bending, 2001 amer std strat i can bend to th pickguard or touch the wood at the back and springs right back to tune ...now admittedly i got my stuff when mars was going out of business so i paid about half price,but not counting setup and machine work you can get the parts for around 100$s....i paid 20 for the lsr and 40 for the tuners and 60 for machining and setup...by far the best 120$s i ever spent
 
Just thought I'd add to the Hendrix statement. If you listen to his live stuff, Jimi is constantly tuning his guitar. Not just between songs, but during them as well.

Peace, Jim
 
Jim Marquard said:
Just thought I'd add to the Hendrix statement. If you listen to his live stuff, Jimi is constantly tuning his guitar. Not just between songs, but during them as well.

Peace, Jim
Click to expand...

Being old enough to have seen Jimi live, I'll vouch for this statement. He was tuning all the time. I don't remember whether I saw him in '67 or '68, but it was in Chicago. The guys I was with said I just stood there with my mouth open the whole time!

I recently read an older interview with Jeff Beck where he was asked how he kept the guitar in tune with all his whammy bar antics. His reply: "What makes you think it stays in tune?"

For my guitar, I found that most of my problems were with the G-string. If I took the string out of the string tree, the problem went away. So, I don't run the G-string thru the string tree.
 
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