My name is Carl Verheyen and I come over to Musicians Institute in Hollywood and do the occasional open counseling and workshops and clinics over here. and one thing that people always ask me about my stratic casters is how do I make it stay in tune and how do I set up my tremolo, my bridge, or vibrato bridge, whatever they call it. I call it the wang bar.
Anyway, this is a $300 fender tex-mex strat, super cheap right off the wall. And I’ll show you what I do. Basically, I want the bridge to float. I want to be able to pull up and go down. A lot of people like to have it right on the deck. But I do a lot of kind of harmonics this kind of thing, you know, and just chorus. Just the ability to shake chorus like that is a part of my playing that they don’t want to give up. And I actually feel a little bit naked when I'm playing a telecaster, a less poll, an SG or something. See, guitars traditionally don’t have that vibrato bar.
What I'm doing though is I set up my instrument so that and I think I have a 9 or 10 strata casters. I'm a big fan. I set them up so that when I pull up on the G string, I get a minor 3rd. I go directly to B flat. And I get a whole step on my B string and I get a half step on my E string. And the way I do it is by adjusting the claw in the back.
What I realized a long time ago, its more physics than anything else, is that string tension on the top here needs to equal spring tension on the back. And once you do, you stay perfectly in tune. I never had tuning problems. Everybody says you float the vibrato bar, why don’t you have tuning problems. It’s because I meticulously set it up to I have those intervals and I'm matching my string and spring tension. It’s hard to say. I realized that the bottom strings are pulling the most tension. The bass strings, E, A, and D have more tension they're pulling. The high strings have less tension. So what I do is I take the claw and I angle it so I've got tighter springs on the bottom and looser springs on the top. And I use 3 springs. This is the claw, my angle is like this so that I've got these springs are loser and these springs are tighter. You can see that and it’s just a subtle little arrangement by working with it takes me 15 minutes to a half an hour to get it set up on a new guitar. I get those intervals.
Now, once I have those intervals set, then I have the confidence to do certain kind of little licks like you hear Jeff Peck do. And one of them would be like in the key of A. I can take a B and pull it up to a C sharp but then when I release it, my finger is on a G but when I'm up there it’s at an A and then I let it go. So I get this sound for the key of A. also, I did this, I took an E natural pull it up to a G which is the 7th of the chord. Let it go and brought it back down to a D and then bent my C natural up to a little bit to a C sharp.
And those kind of licks combine with crazy things you can do are fun to do. And it’s just a wide open world, I mean, I can pull the bar around here backwards and I can play stuff like this.
Anyway, I hope you learned something there. I’ll see you around the Musicians Institute if you're ever in Hollywood. And thanks for listening.
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