When it comes to learning guitar, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Some book one-on-one guitar lessons, while others prefer to go it alone, using online resources like YouTube videos and guitar courses to do things at their own pace.
But some aspiring guitar players take more unconventional approaches to honing their craft, like YouTuber Lightwing, who has modded his Yamaha electric guitar so it shocks him every time he plays a wrong note.
The improvised system – designed to work with Rocksmith, the Guitar Hero-esque video game that sees users play a real guitar rather than a controller to hit notes on a screen – detects when Lightwing misses a note on the game, causing a signal to be sent to a modified taser attached to the lower bout of the guitar, thus shocking him through the guitar strings.
“I want to test if corporal punishment is still conducive in an educational environment by hooking up a taser to a guitar and trying to play music,” he jokes, explaining his thought process behind the project. “That, or I’m a masochist trying to justify myself.”
After setting everything up and getting himself as mentally ready as possible, Lightwing loads up Arctic Monkeys’ Do I Wanna Know? to test the sadistic gadget out.
In an unexpected and painful turn of events, at the moment he fails to hit a note, the wire of his headphones drapes across the guitar’s strings, causing the shock to pass through his head and down through his body to reach the ground.
A sucker for pain – but not a dangerous level of pain – the YouTuber discards his headphones, and resumes his somewhat deranged experiment, attempting to play The Jackson 5’s I Want You Back, Arctic Monkeys’ R U Mine?, Elvis Presley’s Suspicious Minds and Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here with a great deal of ouch on the line. Naturally, it makes for some hilarious results.
“So, what is the conclusion to this experiment?” Lightwing asks after calling it quits. “Is corporal punishment conducive to a learning environment? No, are you kidding me? I don’t wanna touch Rocksmith – let alone a guitar – ever again. This sucked.”
Perhaps Lightwing’s experiment is a lesson to aspiring guitar players out there that it’s probably best to stick with more conventional learning methods.
