Floyd Rose Bridge Review

My first experience with a Floyd Rose bridge was on my Ibanez RG450DX electric guitar. The Ibanez came with a licensed floyd rose with accompanying nut. If you are unfamiliar with the floyd rose, it's a bridge that is designed to allow absolutely zero string binding in the bridge saddles, or in the contours of the nut, by completely locking the strings in place. From my reading the floyd rose was designed to keep a guitar in tune with heavy string bending and whammy bar use. Though the function of the floyd rose seems to work, string changes are quite a bit more complicated.

In order to make a string change, the round barrels must be cut off, and then the raw string end is stuck into a vice like mechanism, that's loosened, and tightened, with an allen wrench. If you look at the picture above you'll see the string running into the saddle with an allen bolt behind the saddle. This allen bolt locks the string into the floyd rose bridge.

once the string is viced into the bridge saddle, it's then threaded through a vice like nut, shown here, and into a regular tuner. Once tuned to the proper pitch, the string is locked down, once again using an allen screw, which fortunately is the same size allen head, as the screws in the bridge. Once locked in place there are small thumb screws, shown in the bridge pictures, so fine tuning can occur.

In theory, and in practice, the floyd rose bridge, and nut system, works very well. I'm not a good enough guitarist to make a determination on whether this is overkill or not. I do know that my Fender American Deluxe Strat, with Fender LSR roller nut, and two point bridge, keeps flawless tune, no matter how hard I beat on it. Maybe if I spent hours dropping octaves every three seconds, the floyd rose would prove itself invaluable. I would not hesitate buying another guitar with a floyd rose, I'd just hate to be on stage, and have to change a string. You'd need an allen wrench, and wire cutters on your person at all times. If anything the bridge is cool looking, and that goes a long way during shop talk. Thanks for reading J.B.

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