Do guitars with Floyd Rose have a brighter tone than guitars with fixed bridge?

[STRHelvete]

Me trying to answer the question from experience, but my trem guitar is long scale with 500k pots and my fixed bridge is a short scale with 250k parts.

 

[ixlramp]

In theory, actually, it should be the other way around, as the yirlding support in a fully floating bridge should dampen higher frequencies disproportionately to the lower frequencies.

^ this.
All else being equal, a fixed bridge is a more rigid anchor for the string, so is brighter and has more sustain.

The difference is noticeable. I owned a Hohner Steinberger copy G3T (best 6 string guitar i ever owned) which had a trem you could very quickly lock/unlock, that way i could hear the tonal change with all else being equal.

 

[GalacticDeath]

Is it an all steel ofr? Trems also have the springs in the back that act like a little reverb tank. They also lose a lot of bass from that gigantic cavity and the bridge making contact on just the knife edges of two posts. A lot depends on the trem. If it's made of good quality tone metals it can sound good but those cheap ones made of brass and zinc will just suck out half of your tone before you know it.

True, I'm glad you brought up the springs acting as a reverb tank, because I was actually wondering about that as well. I looked it up online and couldn't find anything definitive on that, but I definitely found posts on other forums about people getting unwanted resonance from their springs. So that could be the cause of it, at least in my case I kind of like the way it sounds tbh.

Depends on lots of factors. Bridge is definitely one. Of course removing that much wood and changing nut material is going to matter. When palm muting, FR bridges have the ringing springs too. TOM gets a bit of ringing behind the bridge. Hipshot is pretty much silent.

So the bridge matters - but so do pickups, strings, woods, neck construction etc etc. So I don’t think you can make generalised statements that X type of guitar is brighter/darker/etc. It depends on the individual instrument and the combination of all factors together.

Yeah I agree that all the different components make a difference. I was originally thinking that the springs on a Floyd Rose + the metal nut would make most Floyd Rose guitars brighter and more resonant than fixed bridge guitars, but I guess that's not always the case. It could also be that my current fixed bridge guitars sound overly 'dead' for some reason. I typically don't have any issue getting a good tone running my guitars through my own rig, but since I'm recording DI's so I want to get the best tone possible straight from the guitar to send out for re-amping.

 

[bostjan]

You can put foam between the body and the springs if you want to dampen them. Springs might resonate at certain frequencies, but that shouldn't sound like a brighter tone so much as an unwanted noise. The nut should only affect the tone on open strings- if it's not in contact with the vibrating part of the string, it shouldn't matter. But brighter is brighter - you can always EQ brightness away but you can rarely ever EQ brightness into a dull sound. If Floyds sounded intrinsically brighter, I'd be using them a lot more. All of my floating bridge guitars just happen to sound darker.

 

[Flappydoodle]

True, I'm glad you brought up the springs acting as a reverb tank, because I was actually wondering about that as well. I looked it up online and couldn't find anything definitive on that, but I definitely found posts on other forums about people getting unwanted resonance from their springs. So that could be the cause of it, at least in my case I kind of like the way it sounds tbh.



Yeah I agree that all the different components make a difference. I was originally thinking that the springs on a Floyd Rose + the metal nut would make most Floyd Rose guitars brighter and more resonant than fixed bridge guitars, but I guess that's not always the case. It could also be that my current fixed bridge guitars sound overly 'dead' for some reason. I typically don't have any issue getting a good tone running my guitars through my own rig, but since I'm recording DI's so I want to get the best tone possible straight from the guitar to send out for re-amping.

Sure, I get it. End of the day, for recording DI signals, I would think about:

1. What guitar can *I* play the best? I.e. which am I going to play tighter, with the palm mutes the way I want etc. Maybe one guitar sounds a bit better, but if your performance is worse, that matters more IMO. There are lots of famous albums with bad guitar tones, or using really shitty equipment like the original POD, sold state practice amps etc - but they do have good performances.

2. Which one is going to stay in tune better? This is huge, especially if you will be combining multiple tracks, which you almost certainly will. Bad tuning can NOT be fixed by the engineer.

3. Then I'd set about getting the guitar set up perfectly, with new strings, muting strings behind the nut (and springs if you go for the FR guitar). You want action where you don't have rattle or buzz that will be recorded.

Hell, IMO if I was recording multiple songs, I'd likely end up using different guitars for different tracks, depending on what you want to hear. There's a video of James recording rhythm tracks for the Hardwired album, and they're cycling through 5+ of his various signature guitars until they find one that sounds right. They all have the same woods, signature pickups etc - yet some were too dark and muffled, and others too thin and bright etc.