If you’re into electric guitars of all kinds, you’re likely familiar with Graph Tech. The brand — full name Graph Tech Guitar Labs — produces various guitar hardware, and they’re especially known for their guitar nuts. Well, their most recent announcement claims that if you’re playing a guitar with a Floyd Rose bridge or any similar floating bridge equivalent, you might as well completely ditch the accompanying locking nut.
The “necessary evil” of guitars, as Graph Tech’s press release refers to it, is locking nuts, which require Allen keys to tighten them up and lock the strings in the nut slots. Well, with their new Un-Lock Nu, Graph Tech promises absolute stability without any use of tools.
What’s the Deal?
“The Un-Lock Nut revolutionizes tuning,” as their official statement reads. However, it’s not that simple — for absolute tuning stability, these nuts should be used in combination with locking tuners. On the other hand, we don’t need to get too worried when a string snaps as the restringing process is much quicker.
But the foundation of this new nut is the slot design that’s supposed to “perfectly accommodate the unique string behavior on Floyd Rose-style guitars, ensuring precision and stability.”
There’s also the whole reinvented approach to the fretboard radius and how the nut is accommodated to it. The currently announced versions are for 12-inch and 16-inch radiuses, allowing your strings to perfectly align with frets. This is all thanks to the company’s Black TUSQ XL material that these are crafted from.
There are also a bunch of other features, which also include customizable string height and string stress distribution, and they’re even “infused with triple the self-lubrication for a friction-free glide, without affecting the nut slot integrity.”
Installation is also said to be incredibly simple with Graph Tech calling them “a boon for manufacturers.” They also add that, if you want to modify your guitar by adding this nut to it, the installation process is fairly simple.
Official Statement
Dave Dunwoodie, who’s the founder of Graph Tech, shared this statement:
“Everyone loves a whammy bar, and our Black TUSQ™XL, combined with this innovative design, redefines the tremolo system. It maintains tuning stability and offers complete access to the guitar’s machine heads.”
Price and Availability
It’s interesting that, as of this moment, there’s no info on this new nut on the website. And there also seem to be no video demos yet. What we know comes from official press releases, so the new Un-Lock, or Unlock, nut is officially announced, and the recommended retail price is $29.95 as of this moment. We’ll keep you updated if anything new happens. For more info, you can go to Graph Tech’s official website here.
Other New Stuff from Graph Tech
Apart from the Unlock nut, Graph Tech Guitar Labs had other important announcements recently. One of them is about a new innovative bass guitar bridge. Well, technically, they announced it as a complex product called HeliumX/Ghost Saddle. It’s designed for electric basses, multi-scale basses, and bass ukuleles.
The “product,” as they simply refer to it, can be used for any number of strings. We have a versatile patent-pending mounting system that can be integrated with passive or active pickups. Essentially, these are individual string saddle pickups that allow you to get acoustic-like tones, with the help from the integrated active preamp.
