Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: July 27 2011, 16:35 |
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I think it's actually a real shame how so few guitars come with a nicely set up tremolo (or should I be proper and call it vibrato?) unit. Perhaps that Kramer was beyond help, but I've come across loads which can benefit vastly from a bit of attention.
I got given a Yamaha Pacifica 012 (cheaper brother of the better known 112) a while ago - an Indonesian-made thing with a vintage Strat style vibrato. It had been sitting around for a few years, so needed various bits of setup work, but perhaps the most irritating thing was the trem setup - like most guitars in that price range (and, dare I say, a lot of them in higher ones too...), the spring tension was so high that all you could really do with it was push down hard to go between 'up' and 'down' positions.
The thing was that after a few minutes spent balancing it properly, it worked beautifully and made it a far more expressive guitar to play. Even with its rather evil budget machine heads, it held its tuning nicely (though of course it had a fairly straight string pull over its headstock...I suppose the crazy pointy ones are best left for when you've got a locking nut on there, though those bring their own forms of 'fun' with them). I gave it to another forum member once I had it all working nicely, though I was actually slightly tempted to keep it once I'd found out how nice it was to play after I'd worked on it!
You might assume they do that with the trem to make the tuning more stable, but if that's the theory behind it, I can only say it rarely works out in practice! Screwing it down completely would be a different matter, but then they don't go that far either. The five or so minutes saved probably knocks a few pounds/euros/dollars/etc off the price and I suppose few of the people who buy them actually care or even know that's not just how it's meant to be (certainly I'd been playing for a while before I realised).
It seems to me that there are some very decent instruments out there at very low prices nowadays, so it just seems a bit sad when their potential is throttled when a few minor details are skipped over...but then of course, often enough, the minor details are what you pay the serious money for (and if you pay serious money and they've still been overlooked, then you have a real problem! ).
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Same as Sweep above here, I'm a pianist-keyboardist, but I love playing guitar. I've never played an electric up to very recently, when I went into a studio for the first time. 
I was disappointed to find that they were unable to use them due to technical issues and were waiting for the engineer to arrive from Australia. So in mean time they were utilising a brand new technology - one of the first Atari 520ST's with Steinberg's PRO24 (later Cubase). There were mixing-down a new Dire Straits session with it. I was amazed and within a couple months I too had a similar setup at home, but I went for the 1040STf and added it to my Roland Juno and a MT32 - an outlay then of around £1600 compared to £35,000!