I have several guitars that have whammy bars (two with a Floyd, one Wilkinson), but unfortunately they can go sharp or flat. I’d like to modify them to only go flat. What’s the “best” way for me to make this modification?
Take a look at tremol-no, pretty easy to use and you can make your whammy completely fixed, completely free and dive only. I have it on my guitar. Its not perfect or as good as having a different guitar, but I have found it useful when occasionally going to drop d tuning, by making it completely fixed. Country style bends/licks are also better…
yep, I have it on my main guitar though I havent used the whammy much. 3 modes: full floating, dive only, hardtail
I’ve known the guy behind that, Kevan Geier, for something like two decades now, and was one of his beta testers back in the day. The original wads a little finnicky but effective, but he’s continued to refine the design over the years and the current generation are excellent - in particular the clamp-style is almost obscenely easy to dial in. The only effect I can hear when one’s attached and set up correctly in full floatiingmode is if you do a lot of trem flutter, the oscillations are a bit faster and tighter - otherwise, as a guy who for a couple years had stopped using them since his guitars are almost always full float and it was’t worth the hassle to align the arm correctly after doing some maintenance so I just left the receiver off on all my Tremol-no equipped guitars, well… I grabbed a RG550RFR a couple years ago, and had played it for a few weeks before I got around to changing strings, and only then found out that someone had installed a Tremol-no on it under the trem cavity. It’s THAT transparent.
If you have no interest in EVER using one of the trems in your guitars full-floating, then simply blocking the trem is the cheapest way to go. But if you want to be able to at least have the option of floating your trem, a properly installed Tremol-no will let you go from fully immobile to dive only to fully blocked in a matter of moments. I’ve got one on virtually all of my trem-equipped guitars at the moment, and just haven’t gotten around to buying and installing one on the rest. They’re great devices.
I guess the one caveat is, the one thing a properly-installed Tremol-no WON’T do in dive-only mode is allow in-tune compound bending, since the trem is still technically balanced to float. However, it gives you a zero point, so if you just apply a little bit of palm pressure to the bridge while bending as you would on a fully floating bridge, you can hold it against the zero point, and not have to worry about overshooting and pushing it sharp like you would on a floating bridge.
this guy has some cool products and how-to vids. He probably has something to help u