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The August issue of Guitarist, which goes sale on 6 July, features a review of the PRS Torero, the first electric that company has produced to feature a Floyd Rose double-locking vibrato

Such tenuous associations allow us to share an interview we conducted a few months ago with Floyd Rose himself. He tells about the development of the system from its very first incarnation, how he feels about the licensed version of his design and the impact a certain Eddie Van Halen had - both on his business and on music itself.

Les Paul, Leo Fender, Seth Lover, Jim Marshall... the catalogue of inventors that have genuinely altered the course of the electric guitar and its associated music is, if you actually chew it over for a while, a fairly short one. However, any list that doesn't include the name of Floyd Rose is an incomplete one. His creation - an innovative type of guitar bridge and nut that securely locked the strings at both ends - hit the streets with an almost mythical sense of timing: it coincided with the emergence of a four-piece band, blasting out of Pasadena, California, and history was baying to be inscribed onto the slabs of time. The band was Van Halen and the invention was shortly to become the double-locking tremolo system.

"Oh yeah, Eddie (Van Halen) was the driving force, especially in the advertising," concedes Floyd over a freakishly clear transatlantic phone line. "Many people ask if this would have happened without Eddie and I think it would have, but certainly not as quickly. I think guitar players wanted to stay in tune, but Eddie's power and popularity at the time made it explode onto the scene."

Floyd is a little fuzzy on the exact date of the genesis of the concept of the Floyd Rose tremolo system, but it's certain that he filed for his very first patent towards the end of the seventies...

"I'm not very good at timelines, being 61 now, but I started when I was 28 I think," Floyd laughs.

That makes it 1976 by our shaky subtraction and there are so many conflicting accounts of the bridge in the public domain that we're grateful to be able to take our opportunity to ask him how it all started."How much detail do you want?" he asks us with what we're certain is a knowing raise of the eyebrows. "All of it? Okay...

"Well, being in a rock band myself and being a big fan of Hendrix and Deep Purple, using the whammy was something I wanted to do, only I'm real finicky about being in tune when I play," he begins. "All the tricks that we used just weren't good enough for me, lubricating the nut, aligning the strings, using fewer winds around the peg, that type of thing.

"My first modification [Floyd played a Strat back then - Ed] was to loosen the six screws the bridge rocks on in front so I could get more range, and I also had the 1/4-inch bar [arm]. To my dismay that increased range just made it more unstable. I like to start a song with a whammy bar effect but so often you'd come in on the first chord and it was like... horrible!

"So, one night after practice I got back home and I was watching TV while noodling on guitar. I had the nut kinda close to my head and as I pushed the bar down I noticed that the windings on the low E string slid across the nut."It just came to me that that was the problem, so I got a pen and marked the string, went down on the bar, let it come back under spring tension and sure enough that string didn't come back into position. So I figured that, if friction's the problem, the answer was to remove it completely: no friction, no movement.

"So I got some Krazy Glue, glued the string after it was tuned, went down slowly and sure enough it worked for a while, until the glue let go. Boom, it came back in tune... well, at least that string did!"This all sounds like something any of us might do in an idle moment, but the next step would rely not only on Floyd's inventiveness and inspiration, but his engineering skill too.

"At the time I was making jewellery so I had a lapidary rig - you use it to cut stones and silver - and I took a piece of brass and made the first nut which had three little U-shaped clamps and a hole through it," he continues. "I put it on my '57 Strat neck, which is of course sacrilege - every time a collector hears that, they just cringe - but I wanted it to stay in tune. I was real careful too, so I made sure it fitted into the original nut slot - it was maybe just a little bit wider than 1/4 inch - and all I did was drill two holes underneath where the nut would sit. So I started using it and, as long as I didn't go too deep on the bar, it was fine.

"So from there I needed a stronger one that'd hold the strings, so the next version I designed I had made at a machine shop: it cost me $600! I had to borrow the money from my parents, but it worked pretty well. I started the learning process of metalworking and hardening, the fact that the steel on the strings dents the metal after you clamp a few times, so it stops working."

Floyd considers this as the very first version of what would become the familiar double-locking system. The second version included both a locking nut and a new bridge, with the third featuring an improved bridge design. Floyd takes up the story.

"The progression was set in place and when I showed it to a few people, of course they wanted one. The second guy I sold one to was Randy Hansen, an amazing Hendrix impersonator.

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