Simple Fatherly Advice

Proper subtitle for this post: How to tune a Schecter guitar with a Floyd-Rose tremolo bridge.

Sometimes the simplest tasks, performed hundreds of times, become herculean when the parameters change. And sometimes your good intentions cause those changes and leave you sitting with a half-assembled Schecter guitar and a somewhat confused teenage son.

Backstory: Bubba needs a new guitar for summer camp. The “regulars” are going to sit for a few weeks, strings loosened, in Studio Zero Sound Labs (a/k/a our basement) while he’s away; he needs something with the ruggedness to survive seven weeks in the bear- and teen boy-infested mountains of Pennsylvania. Easiest approach: look for guitars whose reviews include references like “I play in a metal band and threw this guitar at my drummer; it broke a string and the drummer got hurt but not the guitar” or “I hit the concrete floor in a club guitar first and my ribs should heal in a few weeks where the upper horn of the solid body got me.” Summer camp is a mosh pit with more mud.

Solution: Schecter Damien with Floyd Rose tremolo bridge. I bought a B-stock model on eBay for less than a third of the street price; the finish defects and chip in the pickup casing are a warmup act that will eradicate any future concern the first time this axe gets dropped, dinged or used to retrieve random laundry on cleanup day.

Problem: Floyd Rose floating tremolo bridges take after the better-known Damien in terms of their hellish tuning problems, particularly when you string the guitar for the first time. The bridge pivots but doesn’t have a locking bar to allow you to fix it in place for stringing and tuning. Tune the top E string, and by the time you get down to the fourth string, you’ve added so much tension to the bridge that it’s pulled up a bit and dropped the first two strings at least a full note. Drop tuning is great for metal riffs, but not when you can’t find a consistent starting point across all six strings. If you tune top to bottom, and then go back and retune the higher strings that were pulled out of tune, the increased tension again pulls the bridge, dropping the recently correct low end out of tune. The process repeats until (a) you snap a string because you’ve gone half an octave above where the string should have been tensioned (b) you realize you’re stuck in a loop or (c) you go insane and throw the guitar at your dummer.

Fix: A 2 inch long piece of half-inch stop molding wedged between the bridge and guitar body, with the trem spring access cover removed. This effectively locks the bridge so you can get a clean 6-string tuning. Once the guitar was tuned, pull the bridge stop out, dropping the string tunings in unison. Grab a Phillips head screwdriver and tighten the bridge spring tension to balance out the string tension on the bridge, going about a quarter turn at a time on each screw to keep the bridge level and avoid over-shooting and therefore over-wearing the screw holes. Get close, and use the fine-tuners on the Floyd Rose to do final pitch correction.

Loudness ensues.

We had a little help from some Google searches on tuning Floyd Rose bridge guitars, but I couldn’t help thinking that this is how my father would solve the problem. He’s great at decoupling problems into their components, and tackling them with the simplest possible solution. When function is called for, he’ll pass on aesthetics to create something that works, and then reinforce just how simple the answer is with a cartoon face or goofy annotation on it so you’re immediately struck by the elegance of the solution. Utilitarian isn’t spartan if it makes you smile. It’s Robert Pirsig’s beer can shim in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance with a twist. I’m going to Sharpie label “Property of Studio Zero Sound Labs” on the wood shim to see if Bubba notices the next time he opens the Ernie Ball Super Slinkys for a restringing.

There’s no such thing as an inelegant solution that works, and it’s one of the most valuable lessons my father has taught me. It’s really good life advice, and sharing it with my own son was a great way to wrap up Fathers Day.

Thanks, Pop.