“I couldn't believe I was playing a guitar where the strings were not attached to anything”: YouTuber builds experimental guitar with floating strings – and it changed the way he played

YouTuber Mattias Krantz has built a guitar with magnetically floating strings, and it looks like something out of a sci-fi movie.

The electric guitar is well over 70 years old, and since the arrival of the Fender Stratocaster and Gibson Les Paul, its base recipe has remained largely unchanged. There have been innovations, from locking tuners to fanned frets and fretboard radius, but Krantz wants to reinvent how the strings sit in place on the instrument and how players interact with it.

“All of this started with me tying a small magnet onto the ends of each guitar string,” Krantz says in a video showcasing the madcap guitar. “But when I tried playing it, it didn't make a sound.”

Indeed, the strings would float in place, but they were so loose they could be literally blown away. What he needed was more tension. The answer: “the strongest grade of magnet humans can buy.”

They should have come with a health warning, as one clip shows two magnets aggressively colliding, and Krantz's fingers are caught between them. But it was a step in the right direction.

Next, he mounted a boxy plastic bridge on a raw guitar body and put the strings in place. This time, they wouldn't budge. But still they made no sound.

“It proved the idea worked, but to actually make it playable, the forces needed were way higher than expected,” he explains. “Because I'm forcing the magnets to work across a gap, it's really inefficient,” with a -10x power loss a major issue.

So, Krantz acquired magnets five times as powerful, and found they launched at the bridge with such velocity that they snapped the piece of wood used to shield the bridge in two. Like a true karate master.

But there was further troubleshooting to be done as Krantz soon discovered that the individual magnets would fight each other. So he pivoted to one magnet for all strings. And it's incredibly powerful: “It was a bit concerning that it was packaged like I'd ordered a grenade,” the guitarist says as he's seen prising it from its packaging.

Magnetically hovering guitar strings (sounds unreal) - YouTube

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It proved so strong that, when he tested it on a blacksmith's anvil, he couldn't get it off. So he ordered a new one. It's this magnet that proved the winner.

“For the first time, the strings could sit close together without smashing into each other,” Krantz says. “But it was a bit terrifying. Only four thin guitar strings were stopping these two magnets from violently colliding and exploding.”

Problems persisted, as having the strings floating meant that tuning one string via the tuning pegs changed the pitch of all the strings. A custom bridge was designed that allowed Krantz to tune by adjusting the length of the strings via small screws on the bridge. A little bit like Floyd Rose fine tuners. Even with this in place, tuning took an entire day. He has incredible patience.

“I couldn't believe I was playing a guitar where the strings were not attached to anything,” he can be heard purring at one point.

The final guitar features a metal frame to withstand the tension of the magnets and the strings, and it has some strange quirks. The floating bridge can be maneuvered like a whammy bar to bend the notes, or pushed towards the neck pickup to increase the volume.

It seems unlikely that Fender will take the concept and run with it any time soon, partly because of the many health warnings the design would have to carry. But it's a fascinating build journey, and one that proves the electric guitar design cannot be revamped on a whim. It takes a lot more than that.