A Question of Balance

The man on the left is Cosmos Lyles. He holds a patent for the Evertune, a new kind of bridge.

Look at what looks like a tremolo spring rout on the black Strat is the spring tension, which goes to each individual string. The best metaphor I can come up with is an automobile suspension, which manages the ups and downs of the road you're on to give you a comfortable ride. When the tuner turns and the strings stretch, the springs take up the slack.

Or, if my explanation and the patent document fail to explain, here's their explanation video.



There's another video where the guitarist of the Sick Puppies (who I've never heard of, but evidently they're big enough that the guy gets a guitar tech — hey, I'm too old to know the cool bands). He takes his Evertune-equipped 335 and frobs the tuning peg with no identifiable change in tuning. This is pretty cool. Yeah, all the cool guitarists know that you go with graphite nuts, saddles and trees, and with locking tuners, if you have to make sure, but that helps with string slippage, it does nothing for string stretching. That could be very valuable.

On the other hand, consider rock guitar. Rock guitar sounds like rock guitar because of bending and vibrato, and if I'm reading this wrong, unless tweak it just right to where you're nearly losing the adaptive glory of this thing, you lose the ability put the vibrato on the notes. Shredder's delight, I guess, but a bane to those of us who like to put a little English on a note.

It should be noted that this doesn't do anything to solve the problems that the Feiten system, for example, is there to fix. If you're incorrectly intonated, you'll still be incorrectly intonated, just consistently wrong. But I think this is a new and exciting idea. What do you think?