So, can anybody explain what McVay Stringbenders are?
Sure. A lot of country players like to use Teles to mimic pedal steel guitar, complete with gliding bends, where you start off with one chord, then bend one string up to create a different chord - typically this “resolves” the chord into a 5th or something. Pedal steelers do it with their foot-operated pedals. I don’t know the standard tunings and bends, but I know that pedal steels enable you to adjust that stuff to your preferences.
Anyway, so Tele players want to achieve that effect which can require bends that go beyond what your fingers can do - holding a chord and achieve a precise, intra-chord bend (made-up term) is sometimes not possible. This one great player, Clarence White - he was in the Byrds at the end and died early in a car crash - working with another player, Bernie Parsons, developed the Parsons-White string bender. They basically routed the crap out of the back of a Tele, inserted a few levers and had it all activate by pulling down on your guitar strap; that would activate the lever and pull on a knob located behind the Tele’s bridge. Here’s a photo. The string in question - typically the B or the G - would be strung past the bridge to that knob and therefore be raised in pitch when the knob turn. A truly Rube-Goldberg-ian contraption if there ever was, but all in the quest for a sound.
This McVay is an update/variant of the PW; unclear if or where the extra routing occurs and if the mechanism is driving the same way - but something mechanical underneath the bridge, triggered by a pull on the strap, to raise the pitch of a string to mimic a pedal steel.
Hope that helps.
I’ve actually been away from Gibson for a while, but still have friends over there.
Family’s ok, we just got rain in Smryna, no flooding. We were very lucky.
From the sound of things down there, you were lucky indeed.
Again, thanks for the update from what you learned about Gibson. If you hang out on the SDMB, we’d love to see you post more on the guitar geek threads…there are quite a few of us GAS sufferers here…
Knowing absolutely nothing about the topography of area or operations of the storage facility, I’m going to assume this couldn’t have been avoided, or at least the severity of lessened, until informed otherwise. I will admit that reading of a facility being built “by a river” and the flooding happening a ways away and then over time migrating downstream as water is wont to do had me scratching my head thinking “Wasn’t this forseeable and, therefore, possibly preventable?”, but there’s got to be rational reasons why that wasn’t the case. Allowances would have been made even for an “Act of God” flood event I would assume.
I agree it’s a shame! I have every guitar I’ve ever owned stored in my basement and would be a little teary to lose them, but they are only material goods and don’t compare to other souls losses.
lieu, I don’t know where the warehouse is, exactly, but there were a couple of factors that made the evacuation difficult. First was the speed with which the floods rose – by the time people realized the Cumberland was going to flood, most roads were impassable. Even the interstates were closed. Since it was a rainy Sunday, most people were at home and not in position to rescue the equipment. Even if they had said on Sunday morning “We’ve got to try to save the instruments!” there would have been almost no way to get there.
I’ve seen it called a 1000-year flood. With all the dams and river management in Tennessee, the Cumberland rising to this level was almost inconceivable.
My sister works for Fender and she said last night that they use Soundcheck for storage of their Nashville custom instruments. She said the Soundcheck folks were riding jetskis through the building to check on things.
StG
What some people don’t realize is that after we got 7 inches of rain on Saturday, most places were still ok, and the Cumberland wasn’t flooding. The Harpeth and the Mill Creek were, but not the big river. It wasn’t until Sunday that we got nailed. The weather people were talking about 2 more inches of rain, we got another 6.
So if they had known they were in trouble, there’s no way they could’ve gotten to the facility. I mean, Sunday, you couldn’t go anywhere.
I’m here, but I’m probably the wrong person to talk about guitars. While I worked there, I still have no idea how to play. I have 4 Epi’s and an Epi banjo, but they just hang on the wall. Sad really.
We’ll get you going - just do what **Robot Arm **and others do and leveage Dopers for tips to keep moving…
I just heard on the radio that restoration experts were being brought in from NOLA to try to salvage what instruments they can. So at least there’s some hope.
Wouldn’t mind hearing a story or two about how the place is set up, either.
Soundcheck Nashville is at 750 Cowan Street. The west end of their building is about 50 feet from the river’s edge.
Not on Sunday it wasn’t! 
Some parts of Nashville got more than others on Saturday. Our neighborhood in South Nashville got 8 to 10 inches the first day. I’m not sure how much more on the second. Overall, it floated big eighteen wheelers together and turned over other big trucks. Some piles of cars were stacked up three cars high.
Nashvillians can understand others bemoaning the loss of good guitars and other musical instruments. Most of us have guitars ourselves, I suspect. Zeldar’s wedding gift to me was a small guitar that says “Patent Pending January 1886.” That was one hundred years to the month before we married.
Now if I could just remember what I did with that 1959 Les Paul Standard…
I didn’t see a link…
See Post #5
Not even close. I’m a woodworker, not a musician, but the tools that Norm uses are bog-standard power tools that you or I could buy. For the most part, they’re expensive and uncommonly found in home workshops, but stock items and easily replaced, regardless.
Guitars, OTOH, are works of functional, playable art, each with their own histories and personalities.
Pardon my ignorance - not ever having had any call for an oscillating spindle drum sander in my life, I have always had the impression that Norm had some top notch kit for every imaginable speciality. I was just making the point that even viewed as ‘tools’, these guitars were exquisite.
Couldn’t agree more.