I jest! Just a little humor.
I have less than nothing against the Bigsby; I probably have 30 guitars with the device now, and a dozen or so others have come and gone. It's been a constant in my "style" (rut?) since the early 80s. I guess I'm just so familiar with the classic PRS streamlined look and feel (and tuning stability!) that the Bigs looks out of place there. At first, anyway.
Well, not on the
first guitar in the thread (like the one Bollinger's playing); there it looks so right I didn't even notice it at first. For me, so far, that's both conceptually and aesthetically the most harmonious use of Bigsby on a PRS I've seen.
Then there's the surface-mount tension-bar version on the Starlas - along with sparkle and pearloid and wavy plastic pickguards, looking for all the world like PRS versions of Gretsch Electromatic solidbodies, plowing that retro furrow. I don't have a
problem with that, and I can feel in my fingers how those guitars play and sound just by looking at them. The Tele neckpup and (I presume) 408 or PG Bridge on the white one really get my inner Pavlov twangdog salivating. Sure would like to get my hands (and ears) on that one.
I guess my cognitive dissonance at meeting these Bigsbyquipped retrovian models (with gold hardware, no less) jusst proves I'm as much a victim (and inflictor) of Guitar Typecasting as anyone. I think of PRS designs and typical construction on one hand, and guitars built with, for, or around the Bigsby (or trapeze tailpieces with long harps) way over on the other hand, and have just been initially surprised to see the twain meet. (But of course, why wouldn't it?)
It looks to me like the guitar at top uses a shorter-bodied Bigsby than would typically be chosen for a guitar of those dimensions. (Unless the body is bigger than I expect, which is possible as it looks sizable in Bollinger's hands.) It strikes my eye because, not knowing any better, I put a small-bodied Bigsby on my 335 in the 80s, with such a long stretch of string behind the bridge that strings
just make it to tuners. I've been told it shouldn't work, but it's always been marvelous on that guitar. I have to assume PRS did it intentionally on the SC-J. Maybe I'd stumbled onto something.
I
would really like to play one of the Bigsby Starlas. I'm no fan of the tension-bar Bigsby, because they're so often deployed where they ought not to have been, just get a Bigsby onto an instrument which either wasn't designed in the first place with a Bigsby in mind - or which was intended for it, but without enough thought given and prototypes tested for the geometry of the thing. Too often they end up with a very short harp between bridge and that infernal roller bar, and a corresponding ridiculously steep break angle over the bridge. The result is a stiff and unresponsive Bigsby and nearly insurmountable tuning issues.
There are exceptions to that rule (TV Jones SpectraSonic, for instance), but too often the tension bar is an essential ingredient for the kind of stability problems that give the Bigsby a bad name, problems which are dismissed with:
oh yeah, that's a Bigsby for you, just part of the package. You know. Slap a "Licensed" tension-bar Bigsby on a guitar with an economy Tunamatic on studs, with a near-vertical break angle to a short harp, the coil spring from a dump truck under a handle made of pressed cheese, with a plasticoid nut that's no better than it should be and So-so Brand tuners - and wonder why the Bigsby barely wiggles the pitch and you can't keep the whole thing in tune through a song. I've fought with too many of them myself, and there's not always an entirely successful fix.
It occurs to me, though, that given PRS's customary attention to every detail of a build - especially the divine string path ("Everything that touches the string is God," says Paul) - those T-Bar-Bigs'equipped Starlas may well perform with superlative suppleness and impeccable tuning stability. That would be a marvelous thing.
There's nothing like a properly behaving Bigsby for expressiveness - and I'm so used to it under my hand that on most Bigsby-less guitars I forget myself and exercise air-wiggles where the handle should be. Oddly, I haven't missed it at all on my PRSes. I rarely even mount the handle on the ones with the vibrato bridge. It's like the PRS has other virtuous tools of expression (extraordinary dynamic response and tonal variety among them) which somehow substitute for the pervasive gentle pitch-wobble and the differentially-detuned dissonance of occasional pitch bends.
That, and I no longer require a Bigsby on a guitar, because I have
Game Changer Audio's fabulous Bigsby on the floor.
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