Q&A for How to Use a Guitar Whammy Bar

A whammy bar loosens or raises the tension on the string to give it a different note. Usually it is used like a flourish or a color tone to give the song a slightly different feel. People use it to start on a half note or quarter note, and then come up to their notes to give it a special sound. They usually drop the note down, but depending on the whammy bar and your guitar, you may also be able to pull up on it to raise the note.

Make sure it is not stuck. You can check it by removing the back cover. Or it might just be your guitar, some whammy bars are just not designed to go up, only down.

Is it too loose or too tight? It could also be an issue with the bridge. If you try tightening and loosening and it doesn't help, take it into a music shop that does repairs and ask them to take a look.

Just move and bend the string(s) manually to change the pitch. (Essentially a whammy bar just bends the strings for you.)

Turn it on and pick each string individually, then as you tune it should have colors or a bar of some sort that goes up or down, indicating how close you are to being right with your tuning.

Floyd D. Rose invented the "tremolo arm," a.k.a. the locking vibrato, in 1977.

Yes, heavy use of the whammy bar will make your strings out of tune. But you can purchase a Floyd Rose tremolo to keep them from going out of tune. Floyd D. Rose created the Floyd Rose tremolo, which prevents the strings from going out of tune.

You might need to loosen the screws on the board a slight bit, so that it can bend when you pull the whammy bar.