Kevin Shields has shared a tip that he says enables him to keep his (extensive) Fender Jazzmaster and Jaguar collection in tune without aftermarket components, even while using the vibrato.
There are few players more closely associated with – or responsible for – the modern day popularity of Fender’s Jaguar and Jazzmaster offset electric guitar designs than the My Bloody Valentine guitarist and songwriter.
However, it is in some ways surprising that the famously fastidious Shields has spent his career embracing a vintage model that offers, well, famously unstable tuning.
In 2007, Mastery came along and offered a tweak on the design that resolved much of the string skipping and noise associated with the vintage vibrato systems, but this requires a retro-fit process and non-vintage componentry.
However, in a forthcoming interview with Guitar World, Shields says he’s figured out an alternative.
“Basically I've found a way of setting the guitar up,” reveals Shields. “Because I use the tremolo arm a lot – that puts a lot of stress on tuning. You can pick up a Jazzmaster if it's not set up correctly, and use the tremolo arm and it'll be immediately out of tune.”
Shields makes the point that the idea of a floating bridge “is that it moves” and says the secret is applying a little more pressure in order to ensure the bridge itself is moving, as opposed to the strings slipping over it.
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“It is all about tilting the bridge back,” says Shields. “I tilt it back so that rather than sitting horizontal to the guitar, it's leaning backwards, so that gives a longer throw. The idea is that the strings don't glide over the bridge, but that they grab the bridge.”
Shields acknowledges that some combinations of guitars and string gauges can be harder to tweak than others (he favors a “Jazzmaster-friendly” 0.46-0.11 string set). Shields also notes that it requires you to reset the intonation of the guitar, but he says it’s the most elegant solution he’s found.
“I first got that idea after trying all the things, like putting lead pencil on it, everything,” says the My Bloody Valentine man. “I've tried every type of tremolo, every expensive Floyd Rose… everything. In the end, I realized I wasn't going to technology myself out of this situation, it was going to be something else.”
If set up correctly – with the bridge pulled back away from the nut – Shields reckons his Jazzmasters and Jaguars “can go for an hour and it won't go out of tune”. More importantly, though, his tweak doesn’t change the feel of the instruments.
“I didn't like the feel of all those [third-party] tremolo arms,” says Shields. “It's the feel of it [the original floating vibrato] that allows me to play in a certain way. Because I don't actually hold it, it's just in the palm of my hand, where my wrist is.
“It's the fact it's so loose, unlike a Bigsby-style. I haven't found anything on any level that replaces it in any way. It just works perfectly.”
Keep an eye on the site for our full forthcoming interview with Kevin Shields, in which he discusses his love of offsets, the current state of his pedalboard and, perhaps most importantly, his new signature pedal, the Fender Shields Blender.
For more on Kevin Shields’ six-string innovations, check out 5 ways My Bloody Valentine changed guitar playing forever.
