Tremelo

The bigsby:

Jazzmaster/jaguar/mustang trem:

Stratsyle tremelo:

floating tremelo:

There are various tremelo systems around, this is in fact a wrong name vibrato would have been better, but the name tremelo is too much rooted.

And Leo Fender called his vibrato a tremelo what is a reason this name become the standard, lets be honest the most guitars around are fenders or copy’s of them.

The leading tremelo systems are, bigsby, stratsyle tremelo, jazzmaster tremelo and the floyd rose or the floating tremelo.

There is also the vibrola not that common and when you see one it’s mostly on a firebird or a SG.

All tremelos work by the same idea, a pivot point, a spring and a lever to operate it (whammy bar).

Only the construction is different.

Is used on all type of guitar body’s not suitable for extreme divebombs, only for the more subtile vibrato’s.

Has the advantage that you can go up and down with it.

In the 60’s and 70’’ s there were a lot of japanese guitars with a tremelo system what was inspired on the bigsby, but looked quite different.

Like this one from Teisco.

This system is copied a lot, the construction is almost similar to the bigsby, only hidden inside the body, goes up and down not suitable for divebombs.

there are a lot of variations made on this tremelo system.

I personally like this trem, nice and simple.

The most common tremelo, almost every cheap guitar is equiped with a tremelo like this one.

There is a big quality difference between the different versions of this system.

Mostly they are detuning mechanism, you better not use.

This goes for almost every tremelo but the cheaper versions of this one have that really bad.

Only goes down, but there are people who adjust it so it’s floating which makes it go both ways.

Better, but not that good for divebombs .

The floating tremelo is always used in combination with top locks.

Goes up and down and is the only system suited for divebombs.

Not a system for the starting guitarist, due the difficult in tuning and changing strings, this can work very discouraging, one of the big advantages of this system is that when you finally manage to get it tuned it will stay in  tune.

Of these there is a lot of shit for sale be careful

what you buy.

The big disadvantage of this tremelo isthat if you

break a string the guitar is completely detuned.

So finishing the song is not possible, you have to stop and replace the broken string, or you must have a backup guitar ready.

A lot of guitarists block this tremelo so it works like a normal stratstyle tremelo