Breaking strings can be stressful at the best of times. But in the middle of a concert, in front of an audience of critical eyes? Forget it. It’s enough to reduce grown men to tears. What on earth do you do if you pop a string mid-gig without a backup? Call for a drum solo while you duck off to the side and change it? What if you don’t have a spare for some reason? What do you do?
The Floyd Rose vibrato bridge and its various licensed versions are great expressive tools in the right hands, but they’re also notoriously fiddly to set up and maintain. But they actually offer a technical advantage that other bridges simply can’t. To some players this quick fix seems completely logical (if you already know it, you can skip the rest and go here), but to others the discovery of this particular trick is an ‘ah-ha!’ moment: if you break a string on a guitar with a Floyd Rose bridge, you can simply unwind a little extra string length from the post, feed it into the bridge saddle, tune it up and keep playing. You certainly can’t do that with a vintage Stratocaster bridge type.
Here are some pics to show you what to do.
Step 1. Oops. Busted a string.

Step 2. Remove the piece left behind in the saddle

Step 3. Unlock the top lock and wind out some extra string length.

Step 4. Pop the newly-lengthened string back into the saddle.

Step 5. Lock it down.

Step 6. Keep rocking.

And that’s all there is to it! If you practice a few times, you can get these changes down to a tight minute or so, just long enough for a drum or bass solo to give you some cover but not so long that everyone goes to the bar.
I stumbled upon this idea when I was about 13 years old, before I even had a guitar with a Floyd Rose. A friend had got a killer Kramer for Christmas, and he broke a string at the bridge on Christmas Day. He didn’t know how to change it so his dad got out the phone book (remember those?) and phoned up one of the guys from the local guitar store to ask if he had any strings they could buy off him. On Christmas Day. The guy did help my buddy out by changing strings on the axe, but when I heard about it a few days later the first thing I thought was “Uh… couldn’t you have just unwound some more string?” Maybe the guitar didn’t have that much string left – I don’t know. But I always kept that little Ah-Ha Moment tucked away in my mental filing cabinet for when I eventually did get an axe with a Floyd.