People have been asking for a fanned fret tremolo for years, and I have spent many cycles designing the ultimate modular tremolo, which will scale just like the regular hardware and can be used for any number of strings, and scale length relationship, etc. The really difficult part was cracking how to make the tremolo modular, but still possible to affect all the strings at once with a single arm. As amazing as the Tremologic™ invention is, most people expect a tremolo to behave in the “normal” way. We do need a little more time to figure out if it actually works though.

The scores of people who have asked if they can put a tremolo on the regular Boden guitars have been brushed away with “No, a conventional tremolo with a single fulcrum point doesn’t work with fanned frets”, but I never actually analyzed it. The reason for assuming it would not work well is that the lower strings end up far away from the pivot point and are affected with more of an up-down motion than a back-forth motion that causes the tremolo effect.

However, as it turns out, the effect is quite similar. First, here is the regular tremolo, in its balance position:

And rotated 5 degrees:

And the fanned fret version, with the first string pushed forward and the sixth pulled back:

And rotated 5 degrees:

As you can see, the movement in the string’s direction is roughly the same for both!

So, I went to work and “hacked” a tremolo and my personal Boden OS 6 demo guitar.

And the results are quite impressive! Here’s a fairly technical demo – we hope to follow up with a more musical one in the near future.