Re: Should I buy a Hipshot Extender?
Uh...no. D-Tuna makes a thing that is basically a Hipshot for a Floyd! Hipshot has been making detuners of various types for longer than you must have been alive.
The
entire advantage of the Hipshot is
speed. If you don't need to drop tune and re-tune live, then you don't need the lever; you just retune. It's expensive and heavy. You don't want to bother with it unless you need the speed for playing live.
And yes, I play acoustic in double drop D often – far more so than electric.
FWIW, these basic ideas are not new. Downtuning has been "a thing" since at least the days of classical music, especially on the bass instruments. I played an uprite bass once that had a very cool mechanism called the Stenholm device. It kept the low string tuned to C, but it did it via a fingerboard extension
below the nut. In other words, the low string had two steps longer of a scale length than the other strings. But it had metal levers located by the nut which would fret the lower notes for you, so you didn't have to fret extremely awkwardly. And you could lock any of those levers down to keep the low string tuned to typical E, or whichever note you wanted from C to E.
It was one of these babies. Crazy ****, man.
