Re: So I Got a Floyd Equipped Guitar... Now What?
I have never owned a Floyd guitar (which is really funny, 'cause when I was a teenager I wanted one so bad I could taste it), but if I ever do (probably for nostalgia purposes to have fun going crazy with once in a while
) I would get one that's down only, for two reasons:
1)When the bridge is flush and making good contact with the body, you get an awful lot more resonance than when it is just balanced on 2 screws and floating between springs and strings - to me, that equals more sustain and a beefier, bigger tone; and
2)If you break a string onstage with a floating Floyd guitar, it is 100% useless 'til you whip out the toolkit and change the string (not a fast process!). Worse than useless actually, because the other strings will have gone very sharp and sound awful playing with other instruments, whereas on a down-only vibrato bridge guitar the other 5 strings should stay pretty well in tune, at least enough for you to finish the song.
Other minor considerations are that when you do a double-stop bend with a floating bridge guitar, the non-bent string usually goes noticeably flat, and palm-muting or resting your hand on the bridge can cause a warped-record effect (of course, you can work on your techniques to avoid this, subtly bend the "non-bent string" up to pitch, etc.). Also, tuning a floating-bridge guitar involves making several passes through every string, as each time you tighten or slacken a string if affects all of the others. As I said, I don't have a Floyd guitar, but my Strats are set down only. You can still get some of the nice gentle chord quiver, albeit not as cool as with a floating bridge...but then, there's a trade-off to everything...plus, that's what Bigsbys are for!
Meantime...go nuts with it! When the strings are properly stretched out, you should be able to dive-bomb until they are totally slack and come back up perfectly in tune! EVH does the pre-bend if he wants it to raise a note - slack the Floyd, hit a note, and bring it up to pitch. Have fun!
