Reinventing the Wheel – The Legacy of Floyd Rose

Floyd Rose changed the future of the guitar’s sound without playing a single note. His invention of the locking tremolo system added a whole new realm of sounds and creativity to the electric guitar that had never been possible before.

Floyd Rose began playing guitar in 1963. In the beginning Rose had no real interest in the mechanical design and parts of the guitar. However, due to the competitive nature of guitarists and the revolutionary music scene of his generation, it was only a matter of time before Rose began to envision and create his own modifications.

“We played very aggressively in those days,” Rose states in an online interview with Guitar.com, “everybody trying to outdo each other, throwing guitars around and stuff. That was actually the moment I started trying to do things to the guitar. That was really the first time I started thinking about trying to modify to get what I wanted out of the instrument.”

Early versions of this device allowed the guitarist to impart a vibrato (slight, wavering pitch change) to a chord or note by moving a bar on the bridge with the picking hand. However, these devices were prone to tuning problems, and were generally unstable and quite limited in their capabilities. Leo Fender's development of the fulcrum tremolo for his Stratocaster line of guitars in the 1950's imparted greater tuning stability and range, but still suffered from a lack of tuning stability.

In the early 1970s, Floyd Rose was a guitarist who dreamed of increasing the instrument's expressive range by slamming, yanking, wobbling, and twisting the whammy bar, a metal bar attached to the tremolo, with violent abandon. This invariably left the instrument frequently out of tune. Rose determined that the way the tremolo was made was counter productive. The strings needed to be locked down to increase tuning stability. Rose felt no pressure while creating his design.

“It wasn't nerve-racking because it evolved into the product by watching other people's interests... I just wanted to modify mine and make it work. Obviously, as time went on, I'm making it and thinking about it; other people see it and go, ‘Hey, I could use one.’ All my friends played the same kind of music, and they wanted to stay in tune too. It was a gradual thing. It was never stressful to me because I was making Indian turquoise jewelry inlays and stuff at the time for my day job while I was being a musician,” said Rose.

While envisioning this device, Rose was touring with Randy Hansen, a guitarist most famous for his emulation of Jimi Hendrix. During the four months Rose was on the road, he came up with the first prototype of the locking system. He put it on a guitar and dared Hansen to put it out of tune.

“He said, ‘I'll bet you I can.’ He grabbed it and started doing the craziest things, throwing it on the floor, playing it with his foot. He picked it up, grinned, held an E-chord, strummed it, expecting it to be completely out of tune, and it was perfectly tuned. He just went, ‘Oh, my God.’ He was completely floored.”

The following diagram shows how the Floyd Rose tremolo works. In figure 1, the tremolo is at rest and in tune. The guitar’s sound and pitch are unchanged. Figure 2, shows the whammy bar of the tremolo pushed down, causing the strings to lose tension and the pitch to be lowered. Figure 3 demonstrates the pulling up of the whammy, tightening the string tension and raising the pitch of the note. The small squares on the far left represent the locking nuts placed at the end of the neck. This system will keep the instrument in tune despite the manipulation of the strings.

”Guitar Player”, still a popular magazine for guitarists, brought even more attention to Rose after they published a glowing review of his tremolo.

During this time, Floyd Rose became acquainted with Eddie Van Halen. Van Halen was frustrated with the Fender-style vibrato system's inability to stay in tune under heavy use. Van Halen used Rose’s new device in a radical way to create a vast array of exciting, never-before-heard guitar sounds. Shrieks, laughter, growls, dive-bombs, chirps, squeals and grunts began to flow from the guitar. These were alluded to a decade earlier by Jimi Hendrix, but the poor tuning stability of the Fender unit prevented him from using these extreme vibrato effects in a live context where tuning was critical.

Eddie Van Halen makes frequent use of the Floyd Rose Tremolo



Between 1978 and 1980, the Floyd Rose become the tremolo of choice for many guitarists as Rose's new system was virtually impossible to throw out of tune with rough handling. With Eddie Van Halen as its star user, it took over the world of modern guitars and fostered a whole new style of no-fear, extreme playing.

Floyd Rose’s groundbreaking locking tremolo system gave guitar players full license to maim, injure, and truly push their guitars with no risk of falling out of tune.

Rose saw a common problem and created an innovative solution. Due to Rose's innovation, players will no longer pay a price for employing aggressive whammy bar use. Rose opened up new avenues for sound and creativity; guitarists around the world remain indebted to his genius.