6 Screw Fender Tremolo Divebomber

[kgk]

@Drew

I can hear a difference if I listen carefully between fretting at the harder, more callused and bonier tip of my finger, than on the softer, fleshier pad, and that’s a much more pronounced change in hardness than stainless to nickel steel (my best guess is that the fleshier part gives a bit more before fully depressing the string enough to fret which dampens higher frequency vibrations a hair, from that microsecond of contact).

I wonder if a HO can be thought of as a two-step process: (a) touching the string somewhere, killing harmonics, then (b) smashing it into a fret [at some speed], preserving what is left from (a) [and potentially adding more energy into the fundamental?].

I certainly believe your argument that (a) would have massive impact, but never thought about this before reading your post. What is interesting about this is that it’s really easy to experiment with, hopefully @tommo can have some undergraduates do some research and publish a paper!

[Drew]

I suspect it’s somewhere in between - you CAN do “hit ons from nowhere,” and some people are exceptionally good at this, but I think for most of us a hit-on on an already ringing note (or a pull off from an already ringing note) is going to have a lot more energy and volume to it than one from silence. I’ll also note that the “hit on from nowhere” crowd argue it’s worth doing because it does sound different, and more “legato” - Holdsworth, and I think more recently… blanking on his name, but the SWYBRID guy, pooh-poohs “Petrucci style” legato because it’s not real legato, for this exact reason.

So, my guess is there’s a millisecond between contacting the string and depressing the string enough to fret it, where the finger starts to attenuate/partially mute the note, before that muting effect is abruptly ended by contact with the strings, and in fact is in part reversed by the force of the string striking the fret. And the degree/frequencies impacted by that muting, is probably in part controlled by how hard the surface of the finger striking the string is.

I don’t want to oversell it - it’s a pretty subtle effect, but it’s audible to me, and it’s something I’ve consciously worked on, fretting more with the tips of my fingers than with the fleshier part, to get a clearer attack in legato playing (i know, I know, not legato… haha).

But, given how pronounced the difference in hardness can be as you move along the finger, and how miniscule, relatively speaking and at the pressures we’re talking, the difference between nickel steel and stainless is, I have an awfully hard time believing the harder frets make a guitar brighter, and that jives with maybe a decade of playing experience on guitars with both stainless and nickel steel (and damned near three on nickel steel).

That said, thinking about it a bit more, the best way to test this would probably be to refret a neck with otherwise identical fretwire, but a mix of nickel steel and stainless, and pass it around to a group of guitarists blindfolded and see if they could identify the difference by ear. My money would be on them not being able to do better than luck.

[kgk]

I suspect that a “hit from nowhere” prefers a high action and a high finger velocity. A high finger velocity will not leave a lot of time for the finger contact to damp out the note, so a slow HO and a fast HO probably sound different, just like the part of the finger that is being used.

Sadly all of my guitars are configured for a low action. I should probably change one to medium-high and see what happens.

[Twangsta]

I think the amp setup has an impact here, for SRV like blues with the appropriate app settings you lose that soft feel with the SS, but I can imagine this to be an advantage when you want more efficiency for other styles like higher gain applications. My opinion on my preferences are from before all this YJM shenanigans , it’s quite possible my preferences have changed entirely by now.

Ne’ways it was quite interesting you figured out it was the hammerons, it didn’t occur to me till you mentioned it. Ones sensitivity to it would be totally context dependent.

[Drew]

Eh, I don’t think there IS a “soft feel” to nickel steel that you lose with stainless, is the thing. I go back and forth between a nickel steel and stainless fret guitar as my main two players, and I’ve certainly never noticed anything of the sort.

[Twangsta]

Well I hear it; it’s quite apparent to me.
edit: this was a thing on tgp too, some people just aren’t sensitive to it, others are, it’s one of those things, there not a one case fits everybody here. Pretty much a dead horse in that sense…

[Drew]

The number of “golden ears” on TGP who swear they can hear the difference between different brands of speaker wire, though… I believe people over there claim that only “more sensitive ears” can hear the difference - my ears are just fine, though, and I haven’t heard anything materially different between stainless and nickel steel/similar across a couple stainless guitars, in about a decade of playing with stainless frets. And the belief that only certain people can hear the difference while certain others just have this blind spot making them unable to tell makes no logical sense - this isn’t color blindness.

If someone wants to do a proper controlled experiment, though - again, using a mix of stainless and nickel steel frets on the same neck seems a great way to tackle this to me, but I’m open to suggestions - I’m all ears, and would be happy to be proven wrong. But until that point, I’m standing by my belief that any difference in tone between stainless and nickel steel is negligible, and is vastly exceeded by any number of other factors that can differ between two guitars - body wood, construction, differences in grain wood between even two chunks of the same species, pickups, bridges, finish, etc.

[Twangsta]

Good for you ? I guess

[Drew]

Sorry, long day at work, that came off a little crotchety.

But, there’s a lot of… idunno… folklore? Snake oil? Received wisdom? in guitar that there really isn’t much basis for, and there isn’t really a logical basis for an ever-so-slightly-harder fretwire to have a pronounced tonal difference, to the degree that you can’t play SRV on stainless, only nickel steel.

The TGP crew believes in a LOT of stuff that’s objectively false, and if their argument is that only “cvertain people are sensitive” to the difference in tone between stainless and nickel steel, that’s setting off the bullshit-o-meter in a big way.

Have you ever played the same guitar, like, exact same guitar, not merely same model, with nickel steel, and then. with stainless?

[VonHerndon]

Once you fire up a live band, any subtlties disappear.

[Twangsta]

It’s OK Drew, I’m quite not well either, but man long hours on this new job, killing me, no guitar for a week either since the power went out with all crazy floods we had so had to move for a week to the city.

I know there’s lot of stuff that gets caught up in grey areas, like many polarizing things. I don’t have the energy to try to convince anybody about my experiences at this point and nor am I really interested in that sort of thing anymore. No offence man, all cool.

[VonHerndon]

Close up of my brass nut…

[Drew]

@Twangsta

It’s OK Drew, I’m quite not well either, but man long hours on this new job, killing me, no guitar for a week either since the power went out with all crazy floods we had so had to move for a week to the city.

Shit man, sorry to hear - where are you again? I’ve seen some pretty scary footage out of Germany and India, but I’m SURE that’s not the extent of it. Fingers crossed for you.

[Twangsta]

Hi Drew, thanks man, we’re at higher ground, unfortunately others had extensive damage. The worst part was all this crazy weather gave me asthma after like 7/8 years, that was the bear, moving to the city with it, diving everybody and trying to find the right doc that wouldn’t over react to asthma, these days lots of covid trigger happy docs to be had. Worst is over now thankfully. Missing my guitars though.

[aooeeu]

@VonHerndon

One thing I did on the YelloStrat was to create a threaded collar that uses wave washers to totally eliminate all unnecessary movement of the tremolo arm. This (as I’m sure you know) is one of the biggest killers of tremolo feel.

If you’re interested I’ve been using a Super Vee BladeRunner for a few years and they improved the arm as well. It still screws in though so you can’t do the Steve Vai windmill thing.

@VonHerndon

What happens with slots that wide is you get lateral movement of the string when bending that causes the string to “ride up” the slot floor radius. … The string can also pitch sharp very quickly when bent (as it rides up the radius in a super wide slot) which can be a challenging to get smooth, accurate bends.

Interesting, this could be it. I’ve been following the thread all the while thinking a slight angle shouldn’t be an issue.There is always an angle – it’s just in a different direction. As a thought experiment, imagine the angle was lateral only, no down pull at all. Tuners all offset to one side. Now there’s still the same break angle, but it’s in a different direction. You could, at least in theory, fit a tall nut and rather than filing slots, drill a hole for each string with the right size bit and angle to match the position of the tuners.

That should, at least mostly, just work.

But cutting/drilling the slots accurately would be very difficult. Which makes me think the issue is mostly that 1) the lateral angle isn’t always taken into account properly when filing the slots and 2) it’s much easier to cut accurately when there is no lateral angle.

Which relates to your point about strings rubbing on/up the sides. Maybe if we had perfectly round drilled holes in the nut rather than slots the angle wouldn’t be an issue. But as it is, even best case only the bottom of the nut slot will be round. Thus straight pull probably helps to keep the string in contact with that round surface.

Related question – why don’t builders like PRS position their tuner holes for straight pull?

@VonHerndon

IMHO, the Floyd is a much better system, but I was just determined to make this guitar work with the stock tremolo.

Floyd’s give a different feel and I prefer the sound of the vintage/non tremolo guitars I have tried. Vintage trems don’t “flutter” like a Floyd/Ibanez, so I think there will always be some personal preference rather than one being considered better than the other. Feel free to correct me but I seem to remember EVH saying he didn’t like how the guitar sounded as much with a Floyd, but used it for tuning stability.

[VonHerndon]

@aooeeu, Good points.

In some cases, I’ve had to plug and redrill tuners to correct the problem because there wasn’t enough correction available at the nut. On most guitars, the nut can be modified to correct the issue, but it really is a case by case basis thing.

It does make one question as to why tuners are not arranged in such a way as to offer straight pull when the vintage style trems are used.

[VonHerndon]

@aooeeu - I never meant to say the Fender 6 screw was better than any other tremolo. I was simply determined to make mine work and I thought I would share the results.

I’ve played the Super Vee and the Vega Trem, and both require a properly cut nut to function.

[aooeeu]

@VonHerndon

@aooeeu - I never meant to say the Fender 6 screw was better than any other tremolo.

@VonHerndon Sure, and I didn’t mean to imply that you did My point was just that tremolo choice might include sound, feel, string spacing, ease of setup and looks as well as tuning stability – leading to different tremolo preferences for each of us.

I forgot to mention Rich Harris has lots of info on setting up Ibanez trems:
http://www.ibanezrules.com/tech/setup/index.htm

And something I forgot to mention/ask, is whether 3+3 or reverse headstocks perform better than the traditional Strat design? A reverse headstock might help counter the fact that the bass strings bend further than the treble strings. It might also reduce the higher tension feel of the bass strings a bit. I’ve no idea if it’s a significant difference though.

[garbeaj]

Wow. I don’t have any tuning issues and I’m not trying to be a jerk-but I have personally experienced no ill effects on tone from using stainless steel frets. Everybody always claims that stainless steel is “too bright” and nickel is “warm”. I’ve noticed no difference.

[VonHerndon]

Can’t say anything about tone, but I’ve been having to level and crown my session guitars every 3-4 months of playing daily with traditional nickel-silver frets.

The Jescar Gold Evo Fretwire is totally impervious to string wear. They are my “go to” frets now.