Today, I learned about floating bridges.

It's a very old design for acoustic instruments and as you've discovered - that's the way it works.

 

This is a very prolific example of dropped tuning.

 

Ah seed whut you did thar!

 

some people put low tact tape down to mark where the bridge was while doing maintenance

 

Yup. Blue painter's tape works great to mark the location.

 

Violins! Replace 1 string at a time.

 

Yep: one-at-a-time or painters' tape markers, depending on why you're removing the strings. I usually put another, short piece of tape at a right angle to mark one end of the bridge for immediate, side-to-side location. Kind of overkill, since the bridge tends to to "find center" as the strings are tightened anyhow, but I'm kind of compulsive.

Gretsch pins some of their "floating" guitar bridges at the factory.

 

With violin family instruments that is as much because you don't want the soundpost to drop as for the bridge placement. Finding the right place for the bridge is pretty easy. Getting the soundpost out and re-serving it is a royal pita.

 

I've owned a couple Gretch guitars with floating bridges and always used two-sided tape to set them after sanding the feet to perfectly match the top.

Thank God my last one had a pinned bridge.

And a treble bleed. I was sick and tired of soldering a cap onto the volume pot of my G&Ls and Gretschs. In 40 years Ive never met anyone who thought treble roll-off was a good thing.

 

I think some people end up having them pinned, as mentioned earlier gretsch started pinning some guitar and bass models a few years back.

 

I dunno how Gretsch basses are lately. But the last Electromatic White Falcon copy I had was literally perfect in every way. The first two, purchased ten years ago, were poopiee. Had to have new nuts cut to get them to intonate. The pickups were mud and had to be replaced. Treble roll-off was horrid. Lots of crap like that.

 

And yet Eddie Van Halen had Ernie Ball Music Man pot a knob labeled "tone" on the volume pot for the signature guitar they made for him.

 

Spring 1982, a college gig. A bridge of this kind flew from my bass mid-song. A very embarrassing memory.

 

You've got to make sure the sound post doesn't fall over when you do that, then just make sure to align the bridge with the notches on the F holes... oh wait, this is a bass guitar

 

Gibson 3-point bridges can be especially nasty when you break a string at a gig. The individual saddles are held in place by string tension only and will immediately fall to the floor without the string in place. I have not so fond memories of crawling around on stage looking for the errant saddle while my bandmates stood by impatiently.

 

ya ... that kind of bass the intonation can be iffy as you go up the neck

 

One of my clients had me set up his jazz box guitar so it never sounded like it was on "10" - the opposite of a treble bleed circuit - he definitely wanted treble rolloff - all the time.

 

And if you read the EBMM forums you'll find discussions about cap values and whether or not to use a resistor to fix the roll-off on the EVH model.

EVH wasn't human, anyway. Us mere mortals need a treble bleed.