Whammy Bar Option for Guitar Building

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Frank Pope with FBI Guitars, and I'm here on behalf of Expert Village to talk to you guys about how to build your own guitar. One thing that you need to decide early on, is whether you want to build a guitar that has a tremolo system in it for the bridge, or whether you want to go with one that has a fixed bridge. I'll explain the differences to you, as far as what the guitar is going to be able to do, and then tell you some of the construction techniques that are going to differ between these two guitars. The guitar that I'm holding right now is what is commonly referred to as a tremolo guitar. That means that the bridge, the whole assembly, through the use of a little metal arm, can tilt to lower, not only the tension of the strings, but the tuning as well. This is commonly the sort of thing you would hear in the early playings of Eddie Van Halen, and other players, when you hear big dive-bombs on the guitar, that's what you'll hear. If you look a the back of this guitar, you'll see that when you build a tremolo guitar, not only do you have to route through the body to put the block in, but that you'll have to route some of the back as well to be able to put the springs and the control claw that holds the springs, into the back of the guitar. So there's going to be a limit at some point as to how thin you can build a guitar, before the pickup spaces actually emerge through the back of the guitar into the tremolo space. So that's something that you'll have to keep in mind. If you'd like to have a guitar that's as thin as possible, you can actually build one with a set bridge, a hard tail as it's called, and I'm going to show you that one in just a minute. This is the other type of guitar, commonly referred to as a hard tail. If you look at this bridge, it is secured to the guitar with two posts, which adjust the height of this particular bridge. When you look at the back of this guitar, you can see that there is no routing coming through. There is no routing in the back. Now the beauty of a hard tail bridge, although it will not let you do the divebombs, is that because these posts are set directly into the wood, the sustain on this guitar will usually be better than the sustain on a tremolo guitar. If you are simply after tone, and you don't need a divebomb effect, it's a lot simpler to build one like this, and you may want to consider this one of the first ones that you build. "