This is John Petrucci I'm here at Reverb.com
hanging out we're going to talk about
gear and playing and lots of fun stuff.
So with any sort of floating
whammy bar if you hold a note you know
obviously that the whammy bar is on
Springs it goes you can bend a note both
up and down so it's it's floating in
both directions it's almost like if you
had a ruler on the end of a desk
and you flipped it and it kind of
vibrates really fast that's what you're
doing.
you can do it the other way this way
it's fun
well you always have the horse right the
Eddie Van Halen
yeah that's fun was like it it's kind of
neat you know you have the
sach method where you you play
an artificial harmonic here
The van Halen which which
you play a note
you know we mentioned Holdsworth before
one of the things I picked up from him
was using the bar to kind of slur up to
notes like
And of course just
traditionally using it for vibrato which
here's a funny thing about guitar I talk
about a lot it's very easy to make it
sound bad especially because you can
manipulate strings and bend notes and
they can go out of tune and everything
like that
whammy bar technique is one of those
ways you can make the guitar kind of
sound bad so so I always say you know
with your whammy technique as far as
vibrato is that you want to try to go
for this kind of smooth thing now one of
the things that you can't necessarily do
with traditional vibrato is go above
and below a note so when you vibrato a
note you're going up to the pitch and
back down right you can't really go
below the pitch so what the whammy bar
enables you to do is say the notes here
you're able to go above and below and
target that note in the middle and I
think it's important to keep that in
mind if you don't do that you're just
going to have one direction like
it's fine for a certain vibe but to get
a vibrato that's smooth
So imagine you're kind of like bending
the barb
you know it's always kind of returning
to the note it's going below and above
this is called the JP16 and
it's part of our anniversary series it
commemorates 16 years that I've been
with Music Man and whenever we offer a
new version of the guitar we like to do
two things one of them is keep the
features of the guitar that that are
tried-and-true but at the same time we
want to offer something that's new and
exciting. For 16 years I've been using
the Music Man bridge which I absolutely
love but I wanted to do something
different. Why not? It has a little bit different feel
to it for players that like Floyd's
they know what I mean. It's a different
sound it's kind of a brighter sound to
the guitar as well if you like the
locking nut system of course it
has that and the guitar will never go
out of tune so yeah Floyd Rose is
another floating whammy bar that just
has a different feel. It might be
slightly more sensitive I would say that
that anything that you could do on with
The Music Man whammy bar you can also do
with the Floyd Rose it just it has a
different kind of sound i think it's a
maybe a little bit more rubbery sounding
so the things like I was doing before
like that the little
trick that I was showing you
it's almost like more floaty and a
little bit more sensitive I think
to the touch and in those types of tricks.