Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

antipodean wrote:

Chrome Aardvark wrote:the Ric goes sharp when you overdo the bending. The fact that I've effectively destroyed two accent vibrato in the 17 years I've owned it and that is now with Paul W getting a neck reset kind of suggests I might.

Ouch!!!! I'm trying to get my head around just how vigorous your vibrato technique must be Rod.... Gotta sound cool though!!!

Blackmore used to hammer his vibrato so far that he was practically stepping on the strings.

antipodean wrote:

Chrome Aardvark wrote:the Ric goes sharp when you overdo the bending. The fact that I've effectively destroyed two accent vibrato in the 17 years I've owned it and that is now with Paul W getting a neck reset kind of suggests I might.

Ouch!!!! I'm trying to get my head around just how vigorous your vibrato technique must be Rod.... Gotta sound cool though!!!

Jeez, your vibrato use must put my enthusiastic use of vibrato to shame. I have yet to inflict such damage, and I often shake and dive on Accents like mad!

paologregorio wrote:Jeez, your vibrato use must put my enthusiastic use of vibrato to shame. I have yet to inflict such damage, and I often shake and dive on Accents like mad!

You're just not trying hard enough, Paul!

Really diggin' the Bigsby on my Gretsch, nice and smooth, and stays in tune better than my Strat! Gotta order that Chet arm though, just looks so much cooler to me.
Not making anymore comments about Pauls accent!

paologregorio wrote:Jeez, your vibrato use must put my enthusiastic use of vibrato to shame. I have yet to inflict such damage, and I often shake and dive on Accents like mad!

They break when you pull up from the body too often. I try to avoid doing that with the Rick these days and leave that kind of attack for the Jazzmaster.

whojamfan wrote:Really diggin' the Bigsby on my Gretsch, nice and smooth, and stays in tune better than my Strat! Gotta order that Chet arm though, just looks so much cooler to me.
Not making anymore comments about Pauls accent!

I wouldn't mind getting a Gretsch one day. I'm always eyeing off Bigsby equipped 70's ES-335's with the coil tap switch, but have yet to hand over the money. One of these days though...

Quite amazing to break a vibrato arm - impressive
What's your experience in post-fitting a Rick with an accent? Wondering if it's possible to do myself or if I need a luthier to do it? My go-to shop told me that they wasn't sure it would do any good regarding tuning reliability, but I wonder if they just trying to make me buy their very nice '69 toaster equipped 365.
How does the accent react compared to that of the Jazzmaster which I find very comfortable?
As far as I got it's fully reversible if it doesn't work out.

I haven't broken a vibrato arm as yet, but I've snapped the thread section that joins the arm to the base plate off along with the piece of metal that makes the spring section of the vibrato.

My guitar came with the vibrato installed, so I'm not sure what fitting the vibrato requires. When using the vibrato fairly heavily the Ric goes sharp, but apart from that there are no real tuning issues.

The accent vibrato is nice and works in a different manner to the JM's floating trem. I like plaving around with both and they respond rather differently to each other, as the accent is rather rigid and not really designed for heavy bends, though you can generate some great sustain via the hollow body combined with vibrato and an overdriven amp. The JM floating trem is more versatile in that you attack it in different ways (hammering it with vour palm, pulling up etc) and you can adjust its angle to the body, which also affects the string tension to a degree.

The thing I love most about the JM is you can use vibrato strum and flick the pickup selector switch at the same time pretty easily, which adds another degree of versatility to the instrument. Despite the design advantages of the JM, you can't really beat the warm "boxy" sound of an overdriven Ric.