
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.
^ this.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.
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.
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.
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.