There are three common answers to the question of what holds the strings at the guitar's body.
- A fixed bridge doesn't move: a hardtail, a Les Paul's tune-o-matic and stopbar, a Telecaster's ashtray. The strings stay in tune best and are easiest to change.
- A vintage or two-point tremolo, as on a Stratocaster, rocks on screws or a knife edge when you push the arm. It adds a gentle wobble to chords and notes, and the guitar can go slightly out of tune if you use it hard.
- A locking tremolo, the Floyd Rose and its relatives, clamps the strings at the nut and at the bridge. You can dive a note down to slack strings and come back in tune, but string changes and retuning take longer.
On November 3, 2026, Thomann had 4,266 electric guitars in stock. We read the bridge from each description.
| Bridge | Guitars | Median price | From |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vintage or two-point tremolo | 1,270 | $1,345 | $89 |
| Fixed bridge | 1,235 | $1,034 | $111 |
| Locking (Floyd Rose type) | 488 | $1,660 | $190 |
| Bigsby | 87 | $1,904 | $551 |
| EverTune | 52 | $1,793 | $1,177 |
1,134 descriptions don't say clearly, so they're left out of the table.
Vintage tremolo: the Stratocaster way
Fender Player II Stratocaster, $859
A two-point tremolo with bent steel saddles, the bridge most people picture on an electric guitar. It's number one of 622 ST-style guitars in our ranking. #1 of 618 ST style guitars.
758 of the ST-style guitars at Thomann have this kind of bridge. It's the most versatile choice: use the arm or leave it alone, and block it with an extra spring if you never touch it.
Floyd Rose: for dives and squeals
Ibanez RG550, $1,037
Made in Japan, with Ibanez's Edge double-locking tremolo, a thin Super Wizard neck and a humbucker, single coil and humbucker layout. #4 of 618 ST style guitars.
Locking tremolos cluster in heavy and shred guitars: 104 of 262 heavy guitars at Thomann have one. The cheapest is a Harley Benton at $190; most cost far more, because a cheap locking tremolo is the hardest kind to keep stable.
Fixed bridge: tuning that stays put
Charvel Pro-Mod Plus DK24 HT, $1,272
The hardtail version of Charvel's DK24, with strings through the body, Seymour Duncan pickups and locking tuners. #159 of 618 ST style guitars.
The Floyd Rose version of the same guitar costs $1,295, just $17 more. Jackson prices its American Soloist SL2 with a Floyd Rose 1500 and with a fixed Hipshot bridge the same, at $2,612. So the median gap in the table isn't the bridge itself; it's that Floyd guitars tend to be higher-spec shred models.
Fixed bridges dominate single-cut and double-cut guitars: 274 of 449 single-cuts and 131 of 236 double-cuts have one.
Which one?
- Beginners: a fixed bridge or a vintage tremolo. Both are easy to restring and keep in tune.
- Blues, rock, indie, funk: a vintage tremolo for the occasional wobble, or fixed if you never use the arm.
- Metal and shred with dive bombs: a Floyd Rose. Learn to restring it before your first gig.
- Drop tunings: a fixed bridge, because a floating tremolo has to be readjusted for every tuning.
Where the numbers come from. Every electric guitar Thomann had in stock on November 3, 2026, from its partner feed, without bundles and sets. Bridge types are read from Thomann's descriptions; guitars whose descriptions don't name the bridge are left out of the table. Places are from our ST-style guitar ranking. Prices are Thomann's US-dollar prices.
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Denis Kataev runs AudioFu. Every night the site records the prices of more than 38,000 instruments and studio tools at Thomann, and he writes about what those numbers show: what got cheaper, what just arrived, and which discounts are real.
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