Several months ago, I purchased 2 Floyd Rose Discovery guitars with Floyd Rose’s newSpeedloader locking tremolo. The first thing you’ll notice about the guitars is that they have no tuning pegs. The tuners are eliminated because the strings are precisely cut to length and pre-stretched so that tuning the guitar doesn’t require any winding. (ie: around a tuner peg.)
While I bought these guitars for their tuning stability and ease of string changes, deep down in my techie soul I didn’t really believe the Floyd Rose marketing-speak claiming that string changes can be done in only a few minutes. My Discovery DST-1 was in serious need of a string change, so today I went to Sam Ash , bought a pack of SpeedLoader strings, and embarked on my first journey through a SpeedLoader string change.
Let me just say, WOW. Changing strings IS as easy as Floyd Rose claims. No tools are needed. No winding is required. You simply unclip the string at the tremolo end, and remove the other end from the nut. To put a string on, you simply reverse the procedure. It took me about 5 minutes to do all the strings. Floyd Rose has really made a great tremolo. It has all the advantages of the Original Floyd Rose tremolo in regard to tuning stability, but none of the restringing headaches. I’ve got to say that I’m really impressed.
The only drawback to the SpeedLoader system is that it uses proprietary strings. Guitar Center doesn’t carry them, but to my amazement, Sam Ash does, and at a good price. So props to Sam Ash for not abandoning us SpeedLoader users.