The Sta Toon’d Tremolo Stabilizing Claw from Van Rosa Musical Innovations is a direct replacement for the tremelo claw used in floating tremelos whether that be a Floyd Rose style trem or a Gotoh style trem like I have fitted to my two Suhr guitars in the video above. The process of actually fitting the claw is pretty simple thanks to a comprehensive set of instructions that ship with the device. Even if you lost these instructions however you wouldn’t struggle to work out how to switch over to the Sta Toon’d. The idea is that it gives you the same kind of tuning stability as a hard tail bridge, therefore if you bend a string all of the other strings stay at the correct pitch rather than getting pulled out of tune by the floating bridge moving. This is achieved by a simple system as you will see below of using 2 regular outer springs and then either 1 or 2 light tension inner springs. I didn’t even realise you could buy light tension springs and none were included with the review unit but a quick search on ebay turned up a store in the US that shipped me a pack of 3 for just a few dollars.
Setting up was easy, just remove the old claw with the bridge blocked (I used an eraser placed behind the steel block), snip off the ground wire and then screw in the new claw and attach the ground using the mini screw which saves having to get the soldering iron out. Next you just add the outer and inner spring/s before removing whatever you used to block the bridge. You can see in the image below I used masking tape (as suggested by Scott) to make a note of the claw position before removing, unfortunately I skimmed over the instructions and didn’t realise you were meant to do this with your trem setup with only 2 springs but it got me a ballpark setup.
So once the claw is installed you just adjust the main screws until you get the trem floating and tuned to pitch in the correct position, then you can adjust the position of the inner springs to increase or decrease tension, personally I just screwed them in pretty roughly so that the inner spring claw couldn’t move and produce rattle and it seemed to work perfectly straight away so I haven’t touched it since! Please note flutter lovers that installing this claw will mean you can’t do your beloved Vai flutter bar effects.
The best thing about this product is that it only costs $29.99 from http://vanrosa.myshopify.com/ and it does exactly what it says on the tin, great work Scott.
