Whammy bar

[Pete C]

I searched for subjects involving this but I couldn't find any. Here's my question, I know some guitarists modify their whammy bars so that they tighten the string. Is that feasible/safe for bass? I know bass probably has a good deal more pressure on the neck so it occurred to me that something like this might cause intonation problems, or even for the neck to snap. Any advice on this?

[Tbirdbassist]

Khalers tremolo bridge can be bent upwards as well. Not as far up as down obviously, but it can be done. Les Claypool has 2 or 3 basses with Khaler tremolo's on them, he does some up pitch shifting.

[niftydog]

Snapping a neck with the leverage available from a whammy bar is approximately equivalent to bending a 15" steel girder with your lips... moments after applying lip balm.

Besides, the strings and the whammy bar itself are the weak points.

It will probably shorten the life of your strings, and may cause them to pull out of tune. Setting intonation on any whammy system is a nightmare, and the systems available for bass are considerably less advanced than, say, a Floyd Rose.

If you wanna get serious, the best tremolo system seems to me to be that which is available on Ritter basses.