Jackson SJ32 Rhoads with Floyd Rose Tremolo Bar

My playthings (from left to right): The Don,
The Clap, The Slayer, The Crimson King, Purple Lightning

I don't buy guitar gear that often. It's expensive. Maybe if I made more money and didn't spend so much on anime then I'd have me more than just six guitars, one amp, one pedal, and one guitar-computer interface by now. But I don't. Five of the guitars are ones I've had for a while I'll be honest in saying that I didn't buy any those five. My Ibanez G10 GAX70 was given to me by my cousin. So was my Peavey Rage 158 amp. My Squier was my second ever guitar and that was bought for me by my dad. My Squire doesn't even say "Stratocaster" on it even the it has the same body style. It just says "Squier by Fender" on the headstock. The ole Squier's whammy bar is long since broken and the tip of the old whammy bar is still screwed in. Short of replacing the entire bridge, I'll never be able to use a whammy on it again. Oh, well. I like the guitar well enough, but it just doesn't have the sound or the feel I want.

B.C. Rich Avenge Son of Beast does, but even that one is sort of off. Oh, I love it and it looks so evil, but it only has one knob and that is for volume and one set of pickups so no need for a toggle switch. I can't really play around with the sound on that one. But it's great for straightforward metal. I mean, when a guitar looks like Satan's walking staff you don't exactly play bluegrass on it, do you?

My ESP LTD EX-50 Explorer was sort of a gift. A customer of my dad's sold it to him for seventy bucks. It's got two knobs, two sets of pickups, and a toggle switch. It's bit heavier in terms of weight, but it also has a chunkier sound. I suppose the downside is that the neck is thicker than my B.C. Rich's.

Now I'd like to present to you my Jackson J32 Rhoads with Floyd Rose Tremolo Bar. Unlike all of the other guitars, I can perform insane whammy dives on this guitar courtesy of the whammy bar and the locking system. The guitar locks the strings at the nut (up top near the headstock) so they won't go out of tune. Once the locks on the nut are in place the only way the guitar can be tuned is by using the fine tuners at the bottom.

Perhaps the only bad thing about a guitar that has a locking system that prevents the guitar from going out of tune... is that you can't go out of tune. The Floyd Rose has a floating bridge so that means you can't just downtune the guitar like you would a normal guitar. On a normal guitar you'd rotate the tuning pegs and pick the notes you want the guitar to be in. Just tuning the low E string down a whole step to make drop D on a guitar with a floating bridge is a freakin' process. Remember that this guitar is designed to not go out of tune. If you want to change the tuning you have to change the design. You have to loosen the coil springs underneath the guitar to achieve the necessary balance that will keep the guitar's bridge floating as you tune the strings down. Tension is what makes this guitar work so just tuning the strings down (or loosening the tension) won't work. You will have to adjust the springs as well.

As for breaking a string... if you do so you are royally screwed because any changing in the tension of the strings will cause the other strings to go out of tune.

But there are devices designed like the Tremol-No to kind of counterbalance a lot of the... balance issues created by owning a Floyd Rose.

And then there's always the hard way of downtuning a Floyd Rose...