18 string SPINNING guitar neck is incredible!!

The first time I discovered a spinning guitar was when I watched a Beatles documentary where the crazy inventor Magic Alex made a rotating guitar neck where one side was guitar strings and the other side was bass.

But the Beatles were laughing at Alex's design because it was completely unplayable, it couldn't be tuned, and the neck was wobbling around like crazy.

But I think that Magic Alex were on to something.

And that's when we decided to make this.

Let me show you the disaster of trying to make this thing, and then let's play it.

I so badly wanted to make this thing real, but I was a bit concerned because I don't know how to build guitars, and the only one I made ended up looking like this.

Could be worse, I think.

And now I'm attempting to make possibly the most complex design in guitar building history.

So I ordered a stack of guitar building books and got my engineering mentor Adam on board to help out plan the design.

There was something extremely boring about having one side guitar and one bass.

What if it instead was four sides?

Okay, no, eight sides.

Okay, what if it was cylindrical and the spinning was an actual part of the playing?

And for the actual guitar, after days of planning and thinking, we decided to stack things on this central rod until it looks like a round guitar neck.

We then used the power of nuts to squeeze it all super hard together, making it extremely rigid.

And the reason we're doing it this way is because the other option sounded even worse.

And for the strings, we decided to use every string in existence, from the thinnest guitar string to the thickest bass string in the entire world.

Because this bad boy can fit a lot of strings.

If you unwrap this cylinder, it's the equivalent to a guitar fretboard this size.

Next problem is, how do we make the strings make sound?

Just like a regular electric guitar, with pickups.

But that thing was kind of flat.

I see a problem here.

So I cut it into six parts and you know what?

Now it's broken.

But now it's broken and cylindrical.

You know what I'm thinking?

What if we managed to find single string guitar pickups and then just wire them together?

Turns out they were way too big to fit.

Eventually though I found an American making small custom pickups with a unique animal style design.

We then made our own cases for them for consistency in size and boom!

We invented cylindrical pickups.

So let's give this thing a spin!

Who had idea of a spinning guitar neck on a body that doesn't spin?

What a mess!

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And you indirectly also help support making this biblically accurate guitar creation.

to the drawing board, so cables sucks.

But they're not only used in guitars.

How do we solve the annoyance in other areas in our lives?

Bluetooth.

Yes, we're going to make this a Bluetooth guitar.

In that way, we don't have to wire to the body at all.

We can jump straight from the neck to the guitar amplifier.

It's genius, I think.

Let's try if it works.

If this setup works, my life will never be the same again.

Let's try.

It works.

How can this work?

You see how I wired it?

For the guitar tuners, we just applied the same logic.

We got them in singles and made them into cylinders.

But after five hours of assembly, I can't believe this guitar is pretty much done.

So let's listen to this beauty.

Ooh.

The guitar sounds like shit.

I guess you can hear that.

We're not the guitar builders, okay?

It's not that easy.

But why this bad?

Was it the heights of the strings?

It sounds like they're too close to the frets.

But this guitar is machine-made.

It should be accurate to a tenth of a millimeter.

So we made a second version based on hours of new careful measurements.

Well... And it still sucked.

It's crazy noisy even if the string height is like a wish guitar.

And I was going crazy until this happened.

Wait, did you hear that?

You can hear that if I play a string and let the guitar rotate, the pitch changes like crazy.

Uh-oh.

The neck must be bending and pulling in the strings.

And accuracy doesn't help if it's bending like f***ing banana.

Maybe it wasn't as stiff as we thought.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!

How do we make this a better, more reliable build?

The suspect here is the layers slipping.

So we took a look into the world of engineering to see if we could steal some ideas.

And there it was.

Lego.

Now every single piece was snapping satisfyingly together and finished with some tightening.

This time I wanted to try it on an actual guitar body so Xtool sent me this powerful laser cutter to save this project.

I could just export the design, use the camera in it to align and boom we're cutting.

In minutes we got

a strong bearing mount for the guitar neck I tried cutting 15 millimeter wood for the body and it did work however it felt like any second I was going to burn my house down so is it worth it well that totally depends on what house you have for me this is the best thing I ever begged someone to send me for free there's an affiliate link in my description so order it so you can secondhand smoke some plywood too and let's get ready for version 3 here we go

Whoa, okay.

It's probably the worst invention that has ever come from mankind, over the atomic bomb.

Let's plug this in.

Dude.

The LEGO technique pushed us a little bit closer to the solution, but the guitar was still completely untuneable.

And now, with the guitar in my lap, problems started to reveal themselves so clearly.

We need to lock it down because you can't play when it's moving.

Oh, let's try a spin chord.

It didn't sound as beautiful as I hoped.

This thing is not balanced.

You see, it always lands on the same spot, so you can't spin it.

No, this is embarrassing.

But there was one huge blunder that had been hiding in plain sight this entire video.

I can't believe it.

The design is mirrored.

The strings is going the wrong direction.

The entire design should be flipped.

You can't play chords because there's no chord shapes that you recognize.

This shit is completely unplayable.

This guitar somehow turned out worse than Magic Alex.

We had to redo everything.

Like, this is hundreds of hours of advanced CAD drawings.

It's not a selfie that you can just... mirror.

How did that work?

There you go, we're switching over to a huge aluminum pipe.

This thing is going to be stiffer than other materials that is less stiff.

We balanced each layer by cutting out material on one side and added steel on the other.

This design is getting closer and closer to an airport ban.

And if it all fails, let's at least make it look good when it's doing it.

I built a guitar body with a technique I think guitar builders would rank right up there with a war crime.

I also added a little mystery feature.

It's time for the moment that everyone skips to.

Let's take this thing for a spin.

I can't believe we're going to do this.

Oh, wow.

This is so insane.

Let's check the tuning if it's good.

Yeah, that's pretty good.

Wow, I can't believe it.

It's so weird, but so normal at the same time.

I didn't expect to be able to play anything on this.

Let's try some regular chords.

What string is this even?

Yeah, the first normal thing.

Okay, let's try to do a little trick shot.

360 degree chord change.

Oh, that's going to be hard, but it will look cool.

Oh my god, that was my luck.

This version was working unbelievably well.

It was like all the problems just went out to get some milk.

Okay, let's see if we can actually do what it's intended for, which is switching between guitar, a big bass section, and fretless bass.

Sounds a bit weird, the bass strings.

It's something with the pickups, I think.

Is it supposed to bonk this hard?

But this is also the thickest bass string in the entire world, so I guess it's not that low.

This is the new way to play a chord.

Let's play something that would be impossible to play on a regular guitar.

Probably that.

Oh, that's going to look cool.

There's so many things you can do on this, I think.

I don't know of them yet.

Let's plug in the motor and see what happens.

A brake was kind of hard to do, so I put the motor on it instead because it can motor brake and give some resistance.

You ready?

Let's freaking go.

Whoa, why is it so strong suddenly?

Oh, now we have a brake.

That actually works pretty good.

Whoa, whoa.

Okay, this is probably dangerous.

Why is it this fast?

It was never this fast in the test setup.

Wait, you know what we haven't tried?

Let's try shredding on this thing.

This is gonna be good.

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Are you ready?

Let's try.

Oh my God, it actually works.

Wow, that's going to be so good.

Oh wait, we need to play You Spin Me.

We should tune this to an open tuning, so playing like this actually sounds good.

I'm tuning it to a C open, but no one cares.

The legendary spin strum, I've been waiting for this.

Yeah.

It sounds okay.

I mean, it wasn't spectacular.

I don't know anything to play on the bass.

It's a Davy 504.

If you're watching this, I will bring this to Italy so you can play it.

Everyone has been requesting me to try a slide.

And the logic is that you don't actually have to press down the frets.

So this is like the only truly way to play this thing while it's spinning.

This has so much potential, I can feel it.

We can actually play as it moves with the slide.

I mean, this thing is so much harder to play than a regular guitar.

I practiced this for two hours and this is what I can do.

Yeah, that's as good as I can get it.

That's pretty cool.

I need to practice on that a bit more though.

Now it's time for the violin bow.

Violin doesn't make sense for a regular guitar because the fretboard is flat.

But since our guitar doesn't make sense, it totally makes sense for violin.

Okay.

better place wow that's like a christmas song in hell i don't know guys i'm trying okay i think something must be wrong with my bow

With the slide, okay, now we're talking.

It's not really working.

I would really like to do a follow-up video on this guitar.

Maybe do some weird guitar capos and, I don't know, slides with a curvature.

Send me your design ideas on Discord or whatever.

Also things you want me to try that I missed in this video.

And thanks to everyone who helped me make this guitar.

If you haven't seen it, you need to check the video when I go to Madagascar and milk their spiders to make the first ever spider silk guitar string.

It actually works.

Click here.