Improving Floyd Rose tremolo - or not? Tremolo Stabilizer.

I have two Floyd Rose guitars; a LTD and Harley Benton Fusion-II Pro that I got a month ago from Thomann. Floyd Rose is not necessarily for my playing style, but is nice to have for those whammy bar moments and they keep tuning very well. Problem with all Floyd Rose guitars is that when bending a string, all other strings goes flat. It’s basically impossible to bend and play string below at the same time while saying ”in tune” - if you know what I mean. That results lots of dust on my Floyd Rose guitars. That was a shame as especially this Harley Benton with split coils and stainless steal frets is unbelievably nice guitar to play. So I thought to try something and got myself a tremolo stabilizer from ebay. It was around 11 €/$ so wasn’t big deal if it wouldn’t work.

I checked many Youtube videos for installation and found out there were as many styles as where installers, so the first thing I did I downloaded the instructions from  http://www.fu-tone.com/images/accessories/BLACK-BOX-STABILIZER.pdf

The workflow I used:

1. Make sure your Floyd Rose is properly setup and your guitar is not resting on tremolo in any phase of the installation.

2. Remove back plate from your guitar and re-arrange the springs so that tremolo stabilizer can be installed as center of the tremolo block as possible.

3. It wasn’t necessary to disassemble the style of tremolo stabilizer I got, but if you have the model with two mounting screws you might need to, or tighteng the handnut from the tremolo block side until you’re able to install the mounting screw in the hole below it. Make sure the left handnut is in flush with the inside rod, so you have enough room for adjustements.

4. Position the stabilizer so, that the right end of the rod is just touching the tremolo block. 

5. Screws. I don’t like the idea of drilling a small hole in the soft wood with big power drill and after seeing many installers drilling a) oversized hole b) all the way through into the cavity of the pickup, I decided to try something else. So I took a small hammer and small nail and just tapped the nail enough to make some room for screws. It went perfectly, no cracks and screws were easy to install. Even though my guitar got no cracks, it doesn’t mean your guitar won’t! So proceed with your own responsibility and with caution.

6. The adjustment. Make sure tremolo is still setup correctly, is in tune and guitar is not laying on tremolo. 

6.1 If the rod is not touching the tremolo block, turn the LEFT handnut counter-clockwise until it’s touching.

6.2 If rod is touching the tremolo block and the left handnut is not resting on the stabilizer body, turn the RIGHT handnut clockwise until the LEFT handnut is resting on the body. Check tremolo setup & tuning

Image: Left handnut is not resting on the tremolo stabilizer body, the tighteng of the right handnut is required.

7. After each adjustment, adjust the tremolo and tune the guitar. All this takes time, but it’s required in order to setup the system correctly.

8. Test the tremolo stabilizer setup by bending a string while observing the rod on tremolo block. If the rod loose its contact, turn RIGHT handnut clockwise until rod is again touching the tremolo block through the bending. Check again that LEFT handnut is resting on tremolo stabilizer body, the tremolo setup is ok and guitar in tune. Continue this until you're satisfied!

After adjustments the tremolo shouldn’t move at all when a string is bended, like this:

So how does tremolo stabilizer feels? For me, great! For my rock style of playing, I can now fully utilize this great guitar for my daily usage, all the bends double bends or whatever can be done just like in my Les Paul. Stabilizer doesn’t bother when doing wvibratoa, but when doing very sight vibrato, then it is noticible. Thing is, when you push tremolo arm down, tremolo stabilizer rod looses its contact to tremolo block and when tremolo block returns in neutral position, a ’tap’ and resistance can be felt (see video above). So slight vibrato with bar down, up, down, up doesn’t feel good. But could be one get familiar with it - after all tremolo moves up and down, it’s not locked in any way. Also could be stabilizer can be adjusted in another way to compensate snapping - if you have experience of it, put a comment!

Additional benefit of having stabilizer is that you can play power chords with strings damped with your right hand palm without getting guitar out of tune!

Edit 10.8.2019: Didn’t like the d’addario .10’s the guitar came with so replaced them with .09 Elixir Nanowebs that I have basically in my all guitars, just love them! Changing string gauge with stabilizer was surprisingly easy to do; first adjust tremolo then proceed with instructions above. Everytime you must adjust either, re-adjust the other as well. Step by step you reach the balance between strings, springs and stabilizer. Adjusting everything seem difficult when reading instructions but in practise, it isn’t that hard at all.

Anyways, tremolo stabilizer is so good, it will stay in my Harley Benton for sure. I can play all styles of music and even dive bombs if I want to.