New guitars and a new tremolo stabilizer product tested

Hi again!

Some months ago I bought two new used guitars. Two real metal beasts :-)

From left to right: B.C Rich Ironbird Limited and Agile Hornet Pro 725

The Ironbird is a six string and the Hornet is a seven string. These two are replacing my Gibson Explorer 7. Cheaper guitars but they got what I like, Floyd Rose and 24 jumbo frets. After ripping them apart, setting them up and tuning them to my liking they are also both very nice to play. The only bad thing I found is that the Ironbird is not very well balanced when it's hanging in the guitar strap. It's neck heavy so you need to pull it up the whole time. I've played one gig with the Ironbird already and it was okay, but I will try to see if I can make this better by moving one of the places where the strap is attached. The Agile, inspite its v-shape, hangs really good on you.

I had never heard of Agile Guitars before but I read a lot of good critics about the guitars before I contacted the seller. When I tried out the guitar the setup was really bad. The bridge was heavily tilted to the front and the guitar was out of tune, but everything seemed to be working and nothing seemed to be broken either. The seller asked me in advance what strings I'd like to have and about the tuning. I guess he had it tuned some other way and maybe used different string gauge and that when he then tried to adapt it for me he did not manage to do it properly. I always redo the setup anyways so it would not mean any additional work for me, but I was actually a little worried that it was broken somehow or of such bad quality that it was not possible to fix it. After a while and some out-of-tune-chording I decided to go for it. Glad I did. After setup it was a totally new and really nice guitar.

As you have heard before I use tremsetters to make it possible for me to do unibends and double stops without having to compensate with my fingers. These two babies needed some tremsetting to. A while ago I stumbled on some information regarding the Super-Vee product called the Mag-Lok. It uses magnets instead of springs to increase the spring tension at the floating point. Here's a video explaing it;

After some reading it was really simple to install and it worked really good. The feeling when rocking the whammy bar was smoother around the floating point and I did not have to use that much force when diving down since the magnets as soon as they separated did not add any resistance. Clever! But to have it working so good I had to remove the small hairy washer that was placed between the magnets. The only bad thing about this product was that it sometimes resonated with the notes played. I noticed that on the Ironbird and that guitar already had a bit of foam rubber squeezed in between the springs and the lid to dampen the springs so it also killed the mag-lok resonance. It was not that apparent on the Agile so maybe it was a unique problem on the Ironbird, I was also a little skeptic that the Mag-lok would work on the Agile since it is a seven string guitar and therefore has a higher force from the strings at pitch. And so it seemed the first time I installed it. But the day after when I tried it again everything was working fine. When thinking about this this makes sense since the surrounding springs setts the equilibrium point of the floating bridge. The force needed to dampen the floating bridge will therefore not depend on the string force.

Here are some photos of installation of the Mag-lok and replacing the pickups on the Ironbird to EMGs:

The Mag-Lok installed and the old pots almost removed

Closeup of the Mag-Lok installation

The Mag-Lok in the background and the new wiring for the EMGs in the foreground. I normally run my EMGs on 18 Volts, but fitting one battery in the cavity was tight enough, Two batteries was totally out of the question.

And here is a photo of the Mag-Lok installation on the Agile:

As you can see I have four springs in place due to the pull from the seven strings. I did not realize it at the time of the installation, but all the strings and the Mag-Lok are tilted. To straighten them out would require a small move of the spring holder on the left side in the picture above. Since it does not affect the function of the bridge and that I estimate that the move needed is too small to be able to make new wholes in the wood, I will leave it like it is.


To sum it up, I'm really happy with the Mag-Lok! It was really easy to install and worked immediately without fine tuning it. I will change my first choice of tremolo stabilization
from the HipShot Tremsetter to the Super-Vee Mag-Lok!!

Rock on!