Music Gear Guys Owner Gregory Decker Invented Lok-N-Roll

Gregory Decker owns Music Gear Guys, the guitar specialty store on South Broadway, and he’s a touring guitarist with four decades of playing experience. He also happens to invent tech for musical instruments and has over one hundred patents. He’s been working on one of his inventions, Lok-N-Roll, for several years, and his compensating locking nut for Floyd Rose tremolo systems was just released to the public.

Decker licensed Lok-N-Roll to AP International, Floyd Rose’s distributor, which is also manufacturing the product. To explain what Lok-N-Roll does in layman's terms: It improves instruments by providing proper pitch and compensation across the fretboard. Decker came up with the idea for Lok-N-Roll when he realized his guitars with Floyd Rose tremolos were never tuned properly, and he eventually came up with an improvement on his own guitar.

Decker says Lok-N-Roll and Floyd Rose locking nuts look identical, but he designed Lok-N-Roll so that every string has its own touch-down, or point of reference. “There’s a step inside the actual nut for each string so it vibrates perfectly for each string individually like a piano,” he adds. “So it actually does compensate for perfect tuning. The second thing it does, because of the steps and how I designed it, it gives even tension across the fingerboard." 

He continues, “A lot of people have tendonitis, and so guitar strings, for example, like the G string, are always sharp. It’s inherently sharp. This doesn’t have this anymore. If you’re string skipping, sweeping or tapping, or any of the tricks or anything, you don’t have to apply different string tension for every string. So it’s nice and even, and it helps with carpal tunnel.”

Decker also designed a new bass nut, which he says is the newest thing in the industry since 1977, as well as a new chromatic tuner for Floyd Rose, and he’s developed a new system for Gibson guitars as well as one for Kahler tremolos that will be coming out in the future. 

“There’s a lot more stuff coming out straight from Denver to the rest of the world,” Decker says.