duesenberg les trem

slowist

Junior Member
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Thinking about buying a duesenberg les trem for my eclipse, there's not much info about it online it seems. I'm big on unison bends and double stops, and i'm wondering if anyone here has experience with the thing and can tell me whether that'll be an issue, If so, how could I possibly counteract the issue? or should I not bother with it at all?
 
Seems awfully expensive for what it is, but I can't imagine it would create any more problem with unison bends and double stops than any other vibrato bridge would.

The situation some people worry about is where you bend one or more strings at the same time you're playing others in standard tune. Bending any string increases the pull on the bridge, which has the effect of loosening the other strings slightly so they end up flat. You could end up with a dissonant chord.

While that's technically true, I'm not sure it's an issue in practice. The effect is either small enough to be overlooked, or we've all grown so used to dissonant chords that we just don't hear when it happens. 
 
it seems like a rather unused tremolo so there's no one making a trem stabilizer for it, I'm just wondering if there's a way to keep the other strings from going out of tune during a bend, maybe some way to tighten the spring or something?
 
There's no way to stabilize that design. It uses a coil compression spring to counterbalance the strings. It's basically a Bigsby B5/B7 with a slightly different casting and a higher price. You wouldn't be missing much, anyway. The "stabilizers" for the rear tension spring style bridges aren't all they're cracked up to be, either. They essentially just put a mild detent at the neutral point and hope you don't do anything that'll overcome it like a whole step or multi-string bend.

Maintaining tune during and at the end of a bend isn't that big of a deal, and even hardtails don't do it. Fact is, from the moment you start to bend or stretch any string up to and including the point you stop bending/stretching, you're out of tune the whole time. The tension on different gauges and different constructions (wound vs. plain) changes at a different rate given the same amount of deflection, so bending two or more strings changes the frequency they vibrate at for a given length at a different rate.

This is why Fender's "synchronized tremolo" doesn't work, either. At least, not for keeping the instrument in tune. With any vibrato bridge, if you intonate and tune the guitar perfectly, then pull on or depress the vibrato bar to simultaneously sharpen or flat the whole string set exactly one half-step, they'll no longer be in tune with each other. You won't go from open E to open F or open E#. You'll go to a dissonant mess. It would be difficult to bend a whole stringset with a hardtail, but you can unison bend several strings at once and the same thing will occur.

In practice, bending individual or small groups of strings while playing strings that aren't being bent doesn't happen very often, if for no other reason than there simply isn't room on the fretboard to do that. Bending or wavering a string puts the adjacent strings in harm's way so they can't ring. One of the things you have to learn to do is prevent those strings from making any noise, as it's annoying and non-musical.

If you want to bend individual strings while leaving the others free to vibrate, there have been some solutions. Far and away the most popular is the "B Bender", which is some fairly elaborate mechanical gimcrackery that lets you sharp the B string independently of the rest of them. Country players sometimes use them. I've also seen bridges with more than one lever to emulate the action of a pedal steel using your palm, but I can't find an example at the moment.

Anyway, long story short, you're probably worrying about nothing. Bends are more for the glissando sound effect than to reach any sustained playing position where tuning would come back into play. If you are worried about it, rest assured that you're not alone. Others have worried about it, too. Then they got over it.
 
Incidentally, to illustrate the variation in the amount of stretch you need to get a half-step note change on different gauge/construction strings, check out these Graphtech tuners...

wpid-ratio_landingpage_web-1.jpg

In order to get that same behavior out of a bridge in order to maintain tune, you'd have to have individual levers of varying length on each string all interconnected in such a way as to change all the string's tensions at different rates. That would likely be a difficult-to-tune and maintenance-prone mechanical nightmare.
 
Not sure if you're looking at the same trem, Kevin. The Les Trem is this one:
les_trem_detail.jpg

About $85 but not sure if anyone is selling them stateside.
 
You're right; I was looking at these...

IMG_1560-500x500.jpg

The Les Trem is substantially less costly, but all the other issues remain the same.
 
I was thinking about going with the schaller trem, but from what I've seen and heard, the stability, tone and sustain on that one isn't great, also you sort of just leave your tail piece unused. The les trem seems just minimalistic enough, it doesn't change too much about the look of the les paul, and it seems to do what it's supposed to. The only problem I've had thinking about it is how it'll effect my bends.
 
slowist said:
The only problem I've had thinking about it is how it'll effect my bends.

You're just gonna have to hold the bar while bending like Eddie does:

[youtube]OOjm4I7LRgY[/youtube]
 
Cagey said:
In order to get that same behavior out of a bridge in order to maintain tune, you'd have to have individual levers of varying length on each string all interconnected in such a way as to change all the string's tensions at different rates. That would likely be a difficult-to-tune and maintenance-prone mechanical nightmare.


Basically, the original Steinberger TransTrem.  Which was absolutely brilliant engineering...and kind of a maintenance nightmare when something went wrong, from what I've heard.

[youtube]NOZ1fuXJub8[/youtube]
 
I've heard/read the same thing. Between that, high cost, a tricky installation/setup and the need for special strings, the market just said "no" and the parts are no longer manufactured or available. Bottom line is it's not a big enough problem that anybody is jumping through hoops looking for a solution.
 
Cagey said:
I've heard/read the same thing. Between that, high cost, a tricky installation/setup and the need for special strings, the market just said "no" and the parts are no longer manufactured or available. Bottom line is it's not a big enough problem that anybody is jumping through hoops looking for a solution.

Once you're already in double-ball "special strings" land, having to ask for even more special ones was kind of weird, wasn't it?  And think about this - they made a bass version as well, which (again) required special strings!  How cool / brave was that? 

There was actually a Steinberger guitar with a headstock that had a TT which, I believe, didn't require special strings.  But you're right - by then the train had left the station, so to speak.

All that being said, you'd think in this day & age of easy access to 3D printing and similar advanced manufacturing technologies it wouldn't be as difficult (or expensive) to design a trem unit that could accomplish the same thing.  Ned Steinberger probably did it all with pen and paper after all....

 
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