This Luke guitar has special meaning to me. I’ve been a Floyd Rose Tremolo user since the early Eddie Van Halen days. I’ve probably removed any potential vintage value from some of my older Strats by retrofitting them all with Floyd Rose tremolos. For all you younger guitar players, Floyd Rose tremolo systems were a very cool invention because it allowed us wannabees to do all those cool Eddie V.H. “dive-bombs” and Brad Gillis (Nightranger) trills from bouncing on the tremolo bar and…well, you know, all those wacky 80’s guitar tricks…and have the guitar return to perfect-pitch even when the strings were flopping around on the fretboard. Unfortunately, there were a couple of downsides to the Floyd Rose tremolo system: you had to use both tuners on the headstock and tuners on the bridge to tune the guitar, you had to carry a few extra odd tools to lock the strings in place and change a string if it broke, and if you broke a string in the middle of a song you might as well put the guitar down because the intonation was completely out-of-whack rendering the guitar unusable. But then came along newer tremolo systems like the one found on the Music Man “Luke”, which had locking tuners, precision parts and a more natural feeling tremolo. These new systems made it, once again, easy to tune up, easy to change strings, and easier to keep the guitar in tune if a string broke. So like a baby letting go of his security blanket, I bought this 2nd Luke with its new “Classic Tremolo” and never looked back. Ironically, this light blue Luke is by far my best playing guitar out of all of the 40+ guitars I own.
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