PRODUCT REVIEW
Allparts
TREMOL-NO
BY ART BYRON
Most Strat players have a love-hate relationship with their guitars, that is, they love
virtually everything about the Strat, except
the stock tremolo. By way of clarification,
the Stratocaster’s tremolo is, in strict musical terms, a vibrato, since it’s the pitch that
changes, not the amplitude. It’s been my
experience that Stratocasters don’t like to
stay in tune when their tremolos are used
aggressively. In some cases, the tremolo
mechanism causes tuning problems when
used modestly, or even when it’s not used
at all. So locking it down, even temporarily,
provides benefits.
Most aftermarket tremolos are geared to
keep the guitar in tune while maneuvers are
performed on the whammy bar. And while
the Tremol-No can be used with systems
such as the Floyd Rose, its purpose is quite
different. The Tremol-No is designed to
lock the tremolo in place, preventing it from
moving entirely. In just seconds, the Tremol-No can convert any Strat-type tremolo
bridge to a solid bridge. It does this with an
ingenious yet simple arrangement of a claw/
shaft assembly, and a receiver tailpiece.
The two types of people who would want
the Tremol-No are those who don’t use
tremolo very often (they dislike the tuning artifacts it induces but love the Strat’s
tone), and those who do use the wiggle
stick, but not on every song. If that sounds
like it covers pretty much everybody who
plays a Strat, you’ve got the right idea. I
consider myself in the first group, so when
the Tremol-No came to my attention, I had
to try one out. At just $70 from allparts.
com, and with the promise of no permanent
disfigurement to my Strat, it was an experiment I could justify.
How It Works
At the heart of the matter is the equilibrium between the strings and the tremolo
springs. At times, tuning even one string
can result in the rest of the instrument
going out of tune. Consider a gig scenario
where you need to quickly tune the low E to
a drop D; working tremolos generally—
locking or not—aren’t really designed to keep
the instrument in tune. Another scenario is a
unison bend, where the unbent string drops
in pitch as the other is bent up. The usual
solution is to crank the screws holding the
spring claw in the tremolo cavity, bottoming the bridge plate on the guitar body and
effectively making it a solid bridge.
The Tremol-No dispenses with this, allowing the player to change between vibrato
enabled and a solid bridge at will via two
thumbscrews on the unit. It takes just
seconds to go from locked to unlocked,
and the inventor’s intent is that it can be
operated on stage. Additionally, a third set
screw locks and unlocks a block—called
“deep C” by the Tremol-No’s makers—that
acts as a bridge hard stop. That gives the
Tremol-No three modes: completely locked
down with no wiggle-stick action, hard
stopped for dive-bomb action only, and
totally unlocked for pitch-up and pitch-down movement.
