This guitar has a bridge suspended in mid-air by magnets – and it sounds (and looks) insane
Guitar innovation generally comes in small increments; small upgrades to specific components as opposed to radical new designs altogether. But this new guitar built by YouTuber Mattias Krantz may have just pushed the envelope significantly…
It’s essentially the hollowed-out frame of a guitar resembling something like a double-cut, but the magic really lies in how the strings are attached – mostly in the fact that, well, they aren’t.
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Rather than having the strings fed through a bridge physically attached to the guitar – as is convention – Krantz, who boasts nearly two million subscribers at the time of writing, has conceived a design whereby magnets suspend the bridge in thin air, while providing all the tension required to make the strings playable.
“This guitar looks pretty normal, until you notice the strings aren’t attached to the body,” Krantz says. “They’re pulling tension by these extremely powerful magnets.”
He adds that the gap left between the two magnets “changes everything” about the way the guitar can be played, allowing for taps and movement of the floating bridge for subtle and emotive fluctuations in pitch. “Why does it sound so good?!” he says.
The guitar is certainly a radical concept, and as such, went through a number of design iterations before the final product was realised. First Krantz experimented with tying small magnets to each guitar string, but found they didn’t provide enough tension to actually make the strings playable.
He then tried bigger magnets, which offered enough tension for the open strings to produce a pitch, but it was still too low. “The forces needed are way higher than I expected,” he says.
After some further experimentation in pursuit of enough magnetic force to provide the right tension, Krantz posed the question: “What if I just put all the strings on the same magnet?” He ordered the right magnet for the job, one with 250kg of pull force. It even came in a box which warned: “Strong magnets. Handle with extreme caution.”
After some considerable trepidation about the safety of the build, Krantz finally came up with a playable design, and showcases it towards the end of his video.
You can watch the entire process Mattias Krantz undertook to put the magnetically hovering guitar together in the video below:
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
