Stetsbar
vibrato system for electric guitars
The Stetsbar Tremolo system is a vibrato bridge system for the electric guitar. Eric Stets developed the device in the late ‘80s, and patented it in 1995. He originally designed the device to provide a stable vibrato system that could retrofit to “stop-tail” (fixed tailpiece) guitars such as the Gibson Les Paul with no permanent modifications to the instrument. The manufacturer now provides mounts to accommodate a variety of guitars.
Principle of operation
The Stetsbar is a floating vibrato system—the pull of the guitar strings is held in equilibrium at the scale length of the guitar by two heavy duty springs anchored to a spring retainer block on the unit's base plate.
When a player moves the vibrato bar up or down, the bridge operates with a linear motion in the same plane as the guitar strings. A Tune-O-Matic style bridge mounted on the bridge plate also holds the string anchor block. The bridge plate moves over a pair of linear roller bearings in the base plate. The claim is that the bridge and string anchors move as one eliminating friction over the bridge saddles. An advantage of surface mounting is that installation requires no additional holes or routs in the guitar.
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This entry incorporates text from “Stetsbar” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.