Floyd Rose

The Floyd Rose gained popularity in the 1980s through guitarists like Eddie Van Halen, Neal Schon, Brad Gillis, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, and Alex Lifeson, who used its ability to stay in tune even with extreme changes in pitch.

At the time, Rose made and sold jewelry, and so had the skills and tools to fabricate small metal parts.

Rose hand-made the first bridges and nuts, which were quickly picked up by some influential guitarists at the time, such as Eddie Van Halen.

[6] The first patent was awarded in 1979,[7] and shortly afterward, Rose made an agreement with Kramer Guitars because he could no longer keep up with demand manufacturing the bridges by hand.

[8] The Floyd Rose design's popularity led to other companies making similar bridges, thus violating the patent.

To combat this Floyd Rose and Kramer went on to make licensing agreements with other manufacturers, and there are now several different models available based on the double-locking design.

Fender used the Floyd Rose-designed locking vibrato system on certain humbucker-equipped American Deluxe and Showmaster models until 2007.

The bridge (orange in the diagram) balances on a pivot point, being pulled counter-clockwise by the strings' tension and clockwise by typically one to five springs.

Due to the limitations on the assembly's movement imposed by the guitar's body, the amount of available pitch change is much larger when the bar is depressed than when it is lifted.

This also allows fitting a device to the bridge that can drop the low E-string down to D to extend the tonal variety of the guitar, even during live performance.

Some players find that the Floyd Rose bridge has a "thin" tone,[21] which has led to the development of replacement sustain blocks.

[21][22] Previously, all similar double locking vibrato systems were produced under license from Floyd Rose, and marketed as such, but in 2003 the relevant patents expired.

[3][25] Other players frequently cited as influential Floyd Rose users are Steve Vai,[6][25][26][27][28] Joe Satriani,[26][28][29] Kirk Hammett,[26] Brad Gillis,[25] Tom Morello,[30] Allan Holdsworth,[27] Dimebag Darrell[31] and Synyster Gates.