Floyd Rose - Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages and Disadvantages

The main advantage of the Floyd Rose Tremolo system is the double-locking design which allows the guitar to stay in tune even through extremely large motions/pitch changes, e.g. forcing the vibrato bar all the way down to the guitar body, or pulling up on the bar to raise the tone by as much as a fifth or a seventh. Some examples of this type of usage is described in the popular use section.

A typical set-up of the bridge has it "floating", allowing for both raising and dropping the pitch of notes using the vibrato bar. In this case, if a string breaks the balance of tensions on the bridge is disrupted, leaving the bridge out of position and therefore the guitar out of tune. If this happens in the middle of a performance, the guitar is not going to be of much use to a guitarist who would like to sound "in-tune", which is perhaps most users of the Floyd-Rose (since the main advantage of the system is to achieve pitch-bends without losing intonation when the whammy bar returns to its stationary position). Moreover, since the tension of one string affects the tension of all the others, it can take several iterations through the tuning process before the instrument is tuned. Some players prefer to instead have the bridge flush with the body; one example is Eddie Van Halen. In this set-up a broken string will have no effect on the pitch of the other strings, as the reduced overall string tension caused by the broken string will not cause the bridge to move, as it is already in contact with the body of the guitar. This also allows fitting a device to the bridge that can drop the low E-string down to D to extend the tonal variety of the guitar, even during live performance. Bending, however, still affects the rest of the strings, which makes some double-stop techniques more difficult to achieve.

The bridge's effect on the tone of the guitar is a topic of much disagreement. Some players find that the Floyd Rose bridge has a "thin" tone, which has led to the development of replacement sustain blocks. These blocks are generally larger in size than the standard block and may be constructed from a similar brass alloy or an alternative like titanium or copper. According to reviews this modification might lead to a preferable change in the tonal quality of the guitar.