The Boy has wanted it for some time — a guitar with a Floyd Rose bridge. I didn’t really know what makes a Floyd Rose bridge a Floyd Rose bridge. I knew that in practice it meant that pulling up on the whammy bar of such a bridge would raise the pitch of the strings just as pushing down on it would lower it, which meant that the bridge had to go in both directions. I didn’t think it through, though: that means the bridge has to be a floating bridge, which means that the pressure of the strings itself must be countered by something other than the guitar body. In a FR bridge, that pressure is countered with several springs under the bridge. But that means that if you change the gauge of the strings, you put more or less pressure on the bridge, making a previously well-adjusted bridge completely mal-adjusted.

Add to it the difficulty of stringing this guitar — well, it became obvious that the Boy had to learn how to do it all and learn quickly.