Kahler trem - pros and cons?

[neilli]

It was good enough for Mustaine at some point....

Yeah, but he used the hardtail, not the trem version.

[Animus]

They both suck. I have angels that hold each of my strings in place.

[jacksonpc1]

They are AWESOME!!! check this Kahler
http://www.jcfonline.com/threads/118...ge-W-The-Girl-!!!!

[Swede]

Thanks all!
The conclusion is that I probably can buy this guitar without being disappointed! I've got five Jacksons at the moment and four of them have FR trems so therefore I was a bit suspicious and to that I added my not so positive experiences of Kahler from the 80's. But now it feels alright to seriously consider buying this piece...
Next problem is that there are some other cool guitars out there just waiting to be bought, but I can only afford one...

[dannyr]

Don't be afraid of a Kahler! If set up properly and maintained it is an excellent trem. It is different than a FR, but it wasn't designed to be the same. As far as the different feel...it's easy to get used to.

[Nightbat]

Ofcourse once Kahler decides there is more money to be made in golfclubs again, you'll be left hanging for parts sooner or later

[len]

not a luthier and have no clue as to if this matters but ......there is more wood left in a kahler body than a floyd body so....waiting on the experts to tell me if this means anything:think:

[zuppermuhle]

not a luthier and have no clue as to if this matters but ......there is more wood left in a kahler body than a floyd body so....waiting on the experts to tell me if this means anything:think:

A tremolo Kahler has a maybe a inch deep route that's a lot smaller than your typical floyd recess route.

And obviously Floyd Rose needs a spring route on the back which Kahlers don't have.

However I'd say that the tone differences between individual guitar body woods are larger than the difference a route would make. Not to mention that with Kahler you've still got the roller choice which affects the timbre.

[roodyrocker]

Another advantage to the Kahler is if you break a string live, you can continue playing the rest in tune. With a Floyd once you break a string you're done. The whole thing goes out of tune due to relying on all the strings being present to counteract the spring tension in the back of the guitar body. I have guitars with Kahlers and they work perfectly fine.

[Newc]

This whole thing about "massive amounts of wood-therefore-tone are cut out of a guitar with a Floyd" has really got to stop. The Floyd bridge, springs, claw, screws, and mounting posts weigh about twice what the wood that came out of that hole weighs, so you're adding mass to the body. Mass = Sustain, so you're not losing anything.

One really good thing about Kahler trems is that it's easy to fake slide parts on one than with a Floyd. I used to have one mounted to a Les Paul copy that I could do Zep's version of "You Shook Me" on and it sounded as fluid as Page's slide work (which probably was as sloppy as my trem work but that's beside the point )

Freebird was a bit more work, but it still sounded like a slide and not rubber bands.


You can set them up for pullups, but you have to work with the tension, and you're still not going to have as high a range as with a Floyd. As well, you can't do the really deep dives where the strings crash into the pickups, unless you set really weak pickups really high, and set the cam so it rolls all the way back, which means you can't do pullups then.


However, if we're talking about a non-trem Kahler bridge, then that whole issue is a non-issue. All you'll have to worry about is a slightly darker-than-normal tone since the Kahler has lots of brass and lots of individual moving parts in the saddle assembly alone, with fairly loose contact between all the rollers and pins. It's equivalent in total area to the two knife edges and pivot posts of an OFR.

[j2379]

Kahler the 80's bigsby