If you thought '84 was the year of the trem, you just wait; '85 will undoubtedly see the trem wars really hotting up. The main area of competition, of course, will be producing one with a cam-type pivot system invented by you-know-who. This, in some cases, rather unscrupulous borrowing of design concepts has already led to our famous inventor spending more time in court than producing said trem systems, it seems. All I can say is good luck, I hope you win.

Now, this 'Wonderbar' trem system presently marketed by Washburn but designed and produced in Japan is certainly a worthwhile 'no springs' system. The trem hinges around 'an exclusive torsion bar design' (their words not mine) 'that eliminates all of the problems common to spring loaded tremolos' (end of quote!)

The 'Wonderbar' measures approx 85x88mm with a height of approx 28mm. Fairly bulky really, one of the reasons being that no routing is required to fit this unit to a guitar; simply four screws, which is very neat.

Certainly the Wonderbar has enough features to make it look rather good — individual roller saddles, three brass rollers holding the strings firmly down onto the saddles and a nice set of micro tuners. The trem bar is of a good length and fits into the top of the assembly via a tension collar which tightens the arm but won't fully lock it. We also have the typical tension screws and a facility to adjust each string for a degree of pitch drop. This function is achieved via a set of six saddle-like lugs in front of the micro tuning system. Each has two Allen key grub screws to raise or lower each lug — just like on a bridge saddle.

I think the idea is as follows: by raising the saddle and retuning the string the actual pitch drop increases. For example on the low E string when the saddle lug is raised the E string drops completely off the fretboard — great for impersonating the chap next door's motor bike. However, because of the varying tension of the strings the degree of pitch drop on each string also varies. While the shortest drop on the top E is about a tone the smallest drop on the bottom E is far greater, therefore it doesn't seem possible to bend down to a six string chord, for example. However, I see no reason why a couple of strings could not be tuned together so that half chords etc could be dropped to an exact pitch.

If I sound a mite unsure it's because Washburn sent me the said trem and guitar, two press releases but not a single item of tech info or instruction — therefore if one of the many claims did not seem correct I was left wondering if I'd set the trem incorrectly, or that the claim was incorrect!

However, when I received the guitar the trem was set quite nicely, the action is quite stiff (it can be slackened a bit) but certainly has a smooth positive feel, albeit slightly hard work.

Tuning stability is excellent; I couldn't get the unit to go out of tune, until I broke a string and the unit went sharp, that is. Funny, it claimed that it shouldn't do that. Likewise 'say goodbye to string bending problems' — you know the two note bend syndrome — again not true. If you bend a string here the rest go flat, not as much as on some systems but nonetheless flat is flat.

Still, overall this does seem quite a nice unit. It will retail around 20% less than 'you know what' and appears to come in chrome as well as the smart black finish on this sample.

WASHBURN WONDERBAR TREMOLO ASSEMBLY — RRP: N/A