A few days ago, my wife asked me to tidy a bit my “office room”, where I keep my desk, computer, etc. Looking through the stuff there I have found a promotional brochure of Carvin guitars, brochure that I have received when testing a Carvin guitar some time ago. I was very happy about this so I sit and started to browse it.
I saw this guitar, I am not sure what was the exact model, but I found a similar one on the internet, for the sake of the example. I found it very strange that the guitar (of course, a Carvin model) had a Floyd Rose installed on it, but no lock on fret zero (see the picture).
I am used to the double locking tremolo to have both parts, the lock and the floating bridge, but this one had no lock! I ask myself how efficient could it be and what is the actual advantage of not installing that lock?
It is considered that a floating bridge gives a weaker sustain, while through body strings give the stronger sustain, thing that I don’t dare to argue cause it is obvious. But, as far as I know, and of course, can be considered an argument if you judge by the above example with through body strings, the thing that actually lowers the sustain is the floating bridge, right? Not the lock! Because it doesn’t have mass to resonate and sustain string vibration the same way through body strings have.
Then what’s the use of a Floyd Rose system without the lock?
MG
April 27th, 2008 at 7:28 am
I was thinking the problem was more with tuning-or keeping the guitar in tune when using the FR whammy.
Ovidiu
April 27th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
Yes, that’s the exact thing. When using the whammy, the guitar quickly goes out of tune without the lock on fret zero.
rongsak
August 15th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
yeah.. i agree