Tone Vise

Started by ericar123, February 15, 2018, 12:59:07 PM

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ericar123

Hi
I just wanted to tell you guys about a very cool product that I just installed on my main guitar. It is called Tone Vise and you have to find it on facebook. It's 3 little levers that replace the hex bolts on locking nuts. This works as good as advertised and looks and feels like something hand made by a machinist. If you like what you see you should buy it. I did and am very happy. I have always hated looking for an allen key and dealing with stripped bolts and keys.

https://www.facebook.com/pg/tonevise/about/?ref=page_internal

whippinpost91850

Cool, thanks for posting

aliensporebomb

Absolutely brilliant!  I've got 5 guitars that need this!
My music projects online at http://www.aliensporebomb.com/

GK Devices:  Roland VG-99, Boss GP-10, Boss SY-1000.

Smash

Ah! Brilliant!

I must admit I find myself being drawn to simpler trems with no locking nut, just locking machine heads and no fine tuners cos it's all a bit of a faff. Liking the new Ibanez AZ series - they're taking notice of Suhr etc.

cags12

#4
Guys, I have just installed this (below) on my PRS and works super great. I considered the Tone Wise but I did not like the look, footprint and the less features provided.

I truly believe it's even better
http://www.billedwards.com/inventions.html



One of the main features is the design that does not cause the string to go slightly out of tune while locking the nut, thus eliminating the need of the fine tuners.

https://www.vguitarforums.com/smf/index.php?topic=22822.msg165896#msg165896

cags12

I will create its own post for reference too.

maxdaddy

I agree with cags12, the Bill Edwards locking nut is wonderful.

ericar123

The Bill Edwards lock is similar to the Kahler Deluxe lock which I own and have not had good luck with. Maybe it works better and I should try one of those also.

admin

#8
Quote from: ericar123 on February 20, 2018, 07:32:17 AM
The Bill Edwards lock is similar to the Kahler Deluxe lock which I own and have not had good luck with. Maybe it works better and I should try one of those also.

Lowering the Cam Lever always resulted in the strings going out of tune


whippinpost91850

I used to sell and install the Kahler cam ones. I never had much luck with them. They were way too touchy

cags12

I invite you to read this explaining the while story behind this locking nuts and what design is better executed and why it never got to mainstream.

Personally, mine does what it says and it won't go out of tune. Having quick access to the tuners is invaluable to me.

This is from Bill Edwards FAQ

"What really happened with Kramer?"
Really? I can't believe people still want to know about that. How much time do you have? There is a short and long version of this. Which reminds me... Not long after the debacle, I was contacted by a reporter at the Wall Street Journal and gave a very detailed account of what had transpired during the two years I was with Kramer. I gave him a long detailed account, and when the article came out, he'd gotten virtually everything wrong: the facts, the people's names, the events and even the order things happened in. He wrote a ridiculous P.O.S. that bore little if any, similarity with the things I had said. (I actually find it hilarious now, but at the time I was pissed plenty. The whole experience gave me a new perspective for what passes for "journalism.") After a while, I recognized that just the names of many of the players involved were so similar sounding, (Kramer, Kahler, Schaller, Fender...) that it would be confusing to non-industry folks. So, that being said, I'll tell you everything I actually told the WSJ "reporter," in bits and pieces, and come back and add more from time to time.

To explain this sufficiently and hopefully in an interesting way, first I'd like to go back to the beginning, in the 1980s when I owned a guitar store that did a lot of repairs, building and customization. The Floyd Rose double-locking tremolo actually stayed in tune by eliminating the string slippage and friction at the nodes (ie., the bridge saddles and nut slots.) (Nothing else works sufficiently: locking tuners, roller bearings, greased nut slots etc., will produce or allow slippage and friction that results in detuning. This simple fact, however, doesn't stop people from making and selling all kinds of this crap.) Unfortunately, as many of my store customers found out at the most inopportune times, the hex cap screws and allen wrenches used in the Rose to lock the strings at the nut also twisted the string pairs (between the lock blocks and the baseplate) out of tune - and not in a predictable or precise way. While neither Floyd Rose nor Helmut Schaller, the manufacturer, could solve this problem, they came up with a simple workaround:  the fine tuners from early violin technology (later adopted by Gibson for a stop tailpiece and yes, manufactured by Schaller) would be adapted to fit to the Rose bridge. For Kramer and Rose, this was a solution they felt was sufficient (in spite of the fact the bass "E" fine tuner screw was in the way of your picking hand). At the very same time however, I had been working on a locking solution that simply did not require an external tool. After a couple of years and several false starts, a cam and lever shape was produced that had sufficient mechanical advantage to do the job of retaining the string pairs against their full force up to pitch. (!) We had ground down our Lock Blocks to the optimal height for a given string gauge to achieve the correct positioning or "timing" of the Cam Lever and the combination was just as strong or stronger than the Rose/Kramer/Schaller/locking nut. Interestingly, the action of locking the strings did not affect the strings and therefore did not detune the strings - even when unlocking. This was an significant and unexpected benefit. I had contacted several potential (usually skeptical) licensees to measure interest and line up production and distribution (including Kahler, DiMarzio and Hoshino/Ibanez, to name a few) and we agreed to meet at the next trade show and they could see it in action for themselves and dispel their doubts. At the NAMM show in Anaheim, Floyd Rose approached me and said he'd tried and failed to make a design like mine. Interestingly and disturbingly, he also started to show me ways to "improve" my design - none of which would have worked and we ended up in an argument less than five minutes after we'd met. (At the time it seemed like he had simultaneously forgotten that he'd been unable to solve the problem himself and was unable to appreciate how much time and effort it took me to find a workable solution.) Anyway, he asked to show my design to the Kramer people (mainly Dennis Berardi, Kramer president) and they expressed a serious interest in it. I felt that joining them would insulate me from a possible "lawsuit of attrition" from Rose and the association with Van Halen and Kramer would insure universal adoption and create a new and better standard for locking nuts. At the time, the Kramer electric was the best selling guitar in the world due in a large part to the Van Halen endorsement and the Rose tremolo. I joined Kramer via an license (said to be identical to Floyd Rose's but with suspicious whitespace gaps) and at the very next show six months later, they took enough orders to make me an overnight millionaire. Production, however was stalled. There were none to sell. While I'd given Kramer an exclusive license for my invention, Kramer had given Schaller the job of making the parts.  Schaller had survived WWII (yes, an ex-Nazi) and eventually managed to put together a factory that made parts inexpensively for American guitar manufacturers, namely Gibson and Fender among others. The strength of the dollar against the German mark seemed to be a significant part of that equation at the time. Like most people, I became familiar with the Schaller name via his tuning machines, which were among the first to feature sealed, permanently lubricated worm/gear mechanisms. It was considered a quality product. I found out later that Schaller, however, was still stuck in a post-WWII manufacturing mentality in the 1980s. His factory model was based on rooms of dozens of low-paid German women working at tables pulling levers on mechanisms designed to assemble various parts into completed assemblies. My invention was made possible by CNC (computer numerical control) accuracy and tolerances of .001" or greater. Bluntly put: his manufactured prototypes did not work worth a sh**. Not only that, he was an "arrogant sumbitch" as my grandad would say. Rather than making what was actually on my precisely-drawn print, he attempted to redesign my carefully researched Cam Lever profile to fit his own half-assed idea of how it should work. Who does that remind you of? Correct. Floyd once told me that he and Helmut "don't get along very well." Not only was Schaller unable to hit the center of the cam correctly, he made parts that would simply break when you exerted the force necessary to clamp! My frustration was mounting. To make matters worse, I'd been relegated by Schaller to dealing with his son, Rene, who I considered to be nothing more than a dilettante. Rene had recently come back to work for his father because he'd gone bankrupt trying to run a casino - as he told it. He claimed to be an "engineer" but when I asked for his schooling credentials he allowed as how he wasn't "that kind of engineer." Like Floyd had done a year or two earlier, I was sent to Germany to find out what the problem was at the Schaller factory and get the parts made to fill the tens of thousands of orders that Kramer had amassed. The problem was obvious: they did not have the technology sufficient to build the part correctly. My prototypes had been made with CNC accuracy, but Schaller was still stuck in 1940s. During this delay I started to ask some pointed questions about how they were going to meet their obligations to Kramer and some revealing explanations for the delays were being offered. They had been approached by Fender to produce a similar product for their guitars and had been spending time reverse-engineering my invention for Fender instead of making parts for Kramer! I couldn't believe it. This was a kind of betrayal and corruption that I'd never experienced before. I later found out the Helmut had (barely concealed) contempt for Kramer, Berardi and Rose. He considered them "upstarts" and favored his older clients like Gibson and Fender. To my horror, I suddenly realized that I was at the center of an international corporate espionage in the guitar industry. While all this was going on, Kahler, whom I'd never even gotten a chance to talk to at NAMM, decided to do what Fender was doing: reverse engineer my invention and make copies of my work. I found out that Yamaha had also filed a patent in Japan less than a month after the NAMM show for what seemed to be (from the drawings) an identical copy of my invention. I later found out later Hoshino/Ibanez also made a copy. The list of copycats got very long very fast. I'll admit that I'd underestimated the potential impact of my invention on the guitar industry. One thing the copies had in common is they had fatal flaws. They all rushed to market to claim a share of what they were sure would be a big winner. They all failed to take into account the subtleties that made my design work. I was told by Berardi at some point that the public would not accept my design as is, where the user had to grind down the Lock Blocks to the correct size for their strings. For me, this was a five minute procedure and easily done. Not a big deal. You'd only need to do this again if you changed the string gauges and I'd allowed for a lot of material on the Blocks for this very reason. We're talking a few thousandths of an inch and a couple of minutes time with a grinder or some sandpaper. Schaller was taking directions from Berardi on this and I was stuck in a contract that had not paid me a nickel. At one point Schaller (I'm not kidding...) suggested we attach a flat spring to the bottom of the Baseplate! Yeah... you're an engineer. So in desperation I came up with an intermediary device that allowed the Cam-Screw Assembly to move up and down relative to the Baseplate. It is called the Internal Adjuster Screw. Still they could not get the Cam Levers themselves correctly made. So two years after that NAMM show where I had hundreds of industry people crowding around my little booth for three days non-stop, I have a manufacturer who is clearly incompetent, a licensee that isn't paying me and a horde of copycats flooding the market with half-assed copies. The I get a call from Rene Schaller to tell me that they are abandoning my design. I sh** you not. I'd sunk all my store money into this project and couldn't imagine a way it could fail but it did. I went back to the CNC prototype people and ordered a production run and paid them on credit. I went back to NAMM and instead of the great welcome and accolades I'd experienced two years prior, I heard the same line over and over: "Oh I got one of those from (Kahler; Fender; Yamaha; Ibanez, etc.,) and they don't work." The damned copycats had poisoned the well and killed my beautiful little invention. So as you might imagine, I was frustrated and enraged by this experience and this stayed with me for a long time. Long story short - I put my energies into my other "invention" generically known as "The CAGED System" and my books and videos entitled "Fretboard Logic" and that story has a much happier ending.

Elantric

#11
Quote"What really happened with Kramer?"
Really? I can't believe people still want to know about that. How much time do you have? There is a short and long version of this. Which reminds me... Not long after the debacle, I was contacted by a reporter at the Wall Street Journal and gave a very detailed account of what had transpired during the two years I was with Kramer. I gave him a long detailed account, and when the article came out, he'd gotten virtually everything wrong: the facts, the people's names, the events and even the order things happened in. He wrote a ridiculous P.O.S. that bore little if any, similarity with the things I had said. (I actually find it hilarious now, but at the time I was pissed plenty. The whole experience gave me a new perspective for what passes for "journalism.") After a while, I recognized that just the names of many of the players involved were so similar sounding, (Kramer, Kahler, Schaller, Fender...) that it would be confusing to non-industry folks. So, that being said, I'll tell you everything I actually told the WSJ "reporter," in bits and pieces, and come back and add more from time to time.

Anytime Ive been (mis)fortunate to have been "interviewed" by a news agency, you swiftly realize that orginal concepts and facts often get lost in the news agencies agenda to reduce your life experience to a 5 word phase that fits on the page next to the ADVERTISING.

Explains why in USA they incorrectly label and market the GK 13 pin cable that passes analog signals as a "MIDI Cable"
https://www.vguitarforums.com/smf/index.php?topic=14088.0

And after reading your story - id like to talk to Bill Edwards and share some inside stories not for public consumption

(hint)
https://www.vguitarforums.com/smf/index.php?action=downloads;sa=downfile&id=23
 


the most rare side locking lever action locking nut Ive run accross was this one


http://www.reranch.com/reranch/viewtopic.php?t=47450&sid=6676ba684285b1f54ae1aabb3fcc15c7
Fender System III trem, "designed by John Page, Dan Smith, Charlie Gressett and John Carruthers," made by Schaller, and came on some Fender E series Contemporary models.




https://whammyparts.com/index.php/fender-faq-s/162-fender-contemporary-elite-and-free-flyte-tremolo-history
https://whammyparts.com/index.php/download-manuals

maxdaddy

#12
All,
I worked for Bill Edwards back when he was designing his original cam-activated locking nut. His was definitely the first that did not require an allen wrench to lock/unlock and it did not detune the strings like the Kahler did. The various cam-activated copies that came out soon after (Kahler and Fender) did have issues with tuning and string breakage and they really muddied the waters of opinion with their problems. We tried them all out as they hit the market and easily spotted the compromises and flaws.

His most recent locking nut designs are really wonderful. The cams can even be retro-mounted to your existing Floyd Rose baseplate, saving the trouble of replacing the whole thing.

Bill can be reached via his website: http://billedwards.com 


cags12

Quote from: maxdaddy on February 22, 2018, 07:21:22 PM

His most recent locking nut designs are really wonderful. The cams can even be retro-mounted to your existing Floyd Rose baseplate, saving the trouble of replacing the whole thing.


That is exactly what I installed on my PRS.


Tone Vise

#14
Hello,
Please allow me to introduce myself, my name is Mark Hackett and I'm the owner and inventor of the Tone Vise line of products. I came across this thread today and would like to offer some insight regarding my patented "keyless locks".

The picture above is one of a few handmade OEM samples made for NAMM. Those came with the nut base for distributing to manufacturers, dealers etc. The aftermarket sets will be available without the base as these drop fit onto an existing nut base. Extremely easy to install it takes just a couple of minutes.

One of the improvements I did over the prior art was to make the string clamping blocks spring loaded. So when the lock is loosened the spring raises the block up out of the way making it easier to change strings. More importantly, the spring tension causes the block to rotate before it clamps the strings, which prevents the strings from detuning.

The sets will include 3 keyless locks, 3 tightening posts with screws, 3 new custom string clamp blocks and 6 identical springs.
MSRP will be 45.00 for chrome. Black and other finishes slightly more. There are also "keyless locks" for Floyd tremolos and intonation tool. I just recently invented a pat. pending "pitch shifter" that doesn't require an allen wrench to fine tune and fits within a standard tremolo recessed cavity.

I look forward to hearing your feedback and if you have any questions please feel free to contact me at tonevise@gmail.com


cags12

#15
Quote from: Tone Vise on April 01, 2018, 05:54:01 PM
I just recently invented a pat. pending "pitch shifter" that doesn't require an allen wrench to fine tune and fits within a standard tremolo recessed cavity.

This is something I have been waiting for some time. Can you elaborate or show more about this new device?
The EVH D-tuna is very ugly and takes too much space for my liking.

cags12

Also, you mentioned it does not need Allen key for fine tunning. Is it then possible to install one on each string ?

Tone Vise

#17


I also have a version for stock Floyd Rose Original tremolos and another for Ibanez Original Edge tremolos. They all perform the same function. No allen wrench needed to fine tune, it uses the tremolo's fine tuner. You first tune the guitar to "E", then shift down and fine tune to D.

The trem needs to be stabilized with a Tremol-no, Back Box etc. This is a handmade prototype

Tone Vise

Fedex delivered these Friday

Tony Raven


cags12

Quote from: Tone Vise on April 16, 2018, 08:04:44 AM
Fedex delivered these Friday

I would order one in black for me please.

Would the intonation of the Low E affect the installation of the pitch shifter?

Tone Vise

Quote from: Tony Raven on April 20, 2018, 11:26:52 PM
I'm getting old. I keep seeing reruns...

http://billedwards.com/inventions.html



Yes, the flip locks have been around a long time. Having used both types of locks I feel that my design is much easier to install and use. I've heard the flip type locks described as "fussy" and that's been my experience too. My locks have a lower profile as well and don't go out of adjustment from unlocking. All of my customers have been very happy and lot's of positive reviews.

Tone Vise

#22
Quote from: cags12 on April 21, 2018, 06:21:35 AM
I would order one in black for me please.

Would the intonation of the Low E affect the installation of the pitch shifter?

The screw is close to the same length a the stock one so it shouldn't pose a problem. As the saddle is adjusted further back for larger string gauges the pitch shifter is adjusted back towards the tremolo. if you could post a picture of your tremolo showing were the saddle is at now.

They'll be available for sale soon along with some other goodies.

cags12

Quote from: Tone Vise on April 21, 2018, 10:12:20 AM
The screw is close to the same length a the stock one so it shouldn't pose a problem. As the saddle is adjusted further back for larger string gauges the pitch shifter is adjusted back towards the tremolo. if you could post a picture of your tremolo showing were the saddle is at now.

They'll be available for sale soon along with some other goodies.

So the pitch shifter is adjusted with a washer or spacer? The shifter seems so simple that I can only but imagine how this adjustments are done, including the fine tuning in the ON and OFF position.

Here are a couple picture of my tremolo.




Tone Vise

The keyless locks for locking nuts are now available from Allparts and Allparts dealers. https://www.allparts.com/BP-1016-010-Tone-Vise-Locking-Nut-with-Keyless-Locks_p_5762.html