Part II
So, that's the basic idea - You have an uninvasive little gadget, built like a tank, that when you twist two little thumbscrews in the back completely locks down your bridge. Does it work as described? Can even an inebriated tech-dork like myself install it? Yep.
But how does it hold up in the real world?
Destructive Testing
Well, the first question I had was, "If you forget and grab the bar, what's going to happen?" So, I tuned up the UV, plugged in, made sure the tremol-no was locked down with just the thumb screws and the Deep-C attachment (more on that later) wasn't enguaged, and pushed gently on the bar. Nothing happened. Then I dove down with a bit more force. The thumb screws slipped, and the entire guitar went slightly flat. Reached underneith and unlocked them, and it sprang back into tune.
This is actually a good thing, in my opinion - remember we're talking about a guitar and bridge assembly that's composed largely of wood and thin peices of metal. If you yanked hard on the bar and it was completely immoble, you're either going to snap the bar, your arm holder, or rip your claw screws out of the body. And like I said I had to use quite a bit of force to get it to slip - if in the heat of the moment you grab your bar for a dive, you're probably going to notice that your bridge is locked before you apply nearly enough pressure to knock yourself out of tune. So it's a compromise, but a workable one.
The next logical question to ask yourself is, "what happens if you break a string?" So, since I was about due for a string change anyway, I locked down the Tremol-no with just the thumb screws, grabbed my Leatherman, and snipped the high E while watching my tuner. I don't know if you've ever taken a Leatherman to a perfectly good guitar, but you feel like you're murdering a puppy or something. However, to my relief, the guitar held tune. I've heard people claim a Tremsetter will do this too - frankly, I'll believe them when I see it. I was running mine fairly stiff and always dropped audibly out of tune whenever a string snapped. So, chalk one more up for the Tremol-no.
Now, a word on the Deep-C. Essentially, it's just a little block of aluminum with another thumb screw on it. the idea is, you can lock it down and turn your guitar into a dive-only machine on the fly, then unlock it and go back to full floating. On a seven string guitar, at least, the thumb screw doesn't provide enough pressure to cope with the added tension from the low B, and will slip when you pull back on the bar. Apparently it does provide enough on a 6-string - if one of you guys wants to ship me a good Edge equipped six, I'll give it a try and send it back to you. Say, in six or eight months. However, the Deep-C also ships with an allen screw, and with that installed, I was able to pull back with impunity and still remain fixed.
Another nice aspect of the Deep C, however, is that since when you detune a guitar (say, drop D or Drop A, or a personal favorite seven string tuning of mine, ADADGAD) the bridge tends to pull back, if you lock down the Deep-C and start detuning, your other strings will remain in tune. So, I figured I'd put it to test and after snapping the high E, I locked the Deep C down and started doing a string change.
I typically change strings one at a time, so I can't speak for how it holds up without a single string on the guitar (in fact, due to the change in stresses on the device without anything counteracting the springs, Kevan doesn't recommend using it with a stringless guitar, as forces are applied in a manner the device wasn't designed to take). However, I monitored my tuning as I pulled and replaced each string, from the high E to the low B. Did the guitar shift tuning? VERY slightly. However, my guess here is that what I was seeing was not the tremol-no moving (because, when I added the string I'd just taken off, it went back into tune) but rather slight shifts in the neck as string tension decreased and increased. Any guitar, fixed bridge or otherwise, will do this, and as such the Tremol-no performed admirably, and made what has the possibility of being a very time consuming chore (especially as I was going from a 9-42 with a .58 to a 9-46 with a 56) quite a bit easier.
So, locked down, the Tremol-No has enough resistance to cope with a string change. As such, alternate tunings were a breeze. I'd recommend having the Deep-C in place while doing any substantial drop tuning, but I mean just for kicks I tightened the two thumb screws down as far as I could get them by hand, and started dropping my low B with the Deep C off, and I got to an octave below Drop-A without the Tremol-No slipping. I probably could have gotten farther, too, but at that point my string was essentially slack and I couldn't get my tuner to pick up a pitch accurately. Cool - the ability to mess around with bizarre tunings was something I really missed when I first picked up my 7620 (I've always thought ADADGAD would lend itself gorgeously to heavy Tool-inspired riffing), but the Tremol-no makes that kind of low-tuned butchery possible. This could become detrimential to my social life, lol.
(As an aside, with the Deep-C in place, I tuned my low strings down to a Mesh approved EADG, an octave below standard, with no detrimental problems aside from a slight wandering on the upper strings from the shift in the neck, easily remedied by a quick retune. Sounded like crap - a .56 is not meant to go that low - but it was a hell of a lot of fun
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So that's essentially it - with a Tremol-no installed, you'll still get great (possibly perfect - I'll report back after I sort out my trem issues) bar response, with the ability to go into dive-only or fully fixed trem modes in a matter of seconds. The quality of construction is confidence inspiring (and the eyelet soldering connection is sheer genius), it's a totally uninvasive installation (I never got too worked up about the fact a Tremsetter involved some drilling into your guitar until I bought a UV - suddenly I understood, this thing's a work of art and the idea of taking a drill to it made me shudder), and it does exactly what it's supposed to, giving you perfect bending, along with the unintended benefits of a better reproduction of your pick attack, increased sustain, wider dynamic possibilities, and better stability for both picking single notes and chording (I never knew how much it bugged me to play chords on a floating bridge guitar, with the slight waverings you'd get when digging in hard, until it stopped happening with both this and the Tremsetter). The Tremol-no is a well conceptualized and well executed improvement to the floyd rose style trem, and even if you would be leaving the Tremol-no unlocked the majority of the time, it still makes sense to have it in your guitar just for more in-tune sounding rhythm tracks and the ability to rip through bluesy compound bends with perfect confidence whenever the mood takes you. If you need to be able to do in-tune bends while using the bar then the Tremol-no isn't for you (although it's worth noting it's theoretically possible to run both a Tremsetter AND a Tremol-no in the same guitar), but if that's not a huge deal, then the ability to withstand string breakages, alternate-tuning forays (by the way, did I mention with the Deep-C in place you can detune yet still stay in dive-only trem mode?), and still be able to unlock it and go into over-the-top Vai-esq whammy bar abuse is a strong selling point. I'm pretty enthused.
There's a few things I'd like to see different - it'd be nice if there was a third hole for an allen screw on the receiver, so you could lock the Tremol-no down completely if you wanted to explore high tunings (I'm a crap slide player myself, but if you wanted to go up to open E, you'd need to replace one of the thumb screws with an allen screw, and while it's only a 30 second swap, since there's space anyway it makes sense to me to just add an extra hole so you don't have to). Also, guitarists being guitarists, I could see someone unscrewing the thumb screw a little too far and it falling out and rolling around the stage during a gig - these should be sold with a few spare thumb screws to keep in your case to cover any eventualities. That's really about it, though. It's a very effective little device that works like a charm. I just wish I had one of these in my 7620 when I was playing with my old blues-rock band. It'd have been an absolute godsend.
I'll get installation pics up early this coming week.
-D