The world’s longest guitar? YouTuber builds a beastly three-neck acoustic – and somehow makes it playable
It was only last month that we were once again reporting on the wild experiments of mad six-string scientist Bernth, who managed to record a song with a, erm, neckless electric guitar.
That video was the latest in a long line of instrumental investigations from Bernth, which have seen the YouTuber use dental floss and rubber bands as guitar strings, drill holes into his acoustic, set off sparklers inside his guitar while playing it and more.
Well, you shouldn’t be surprised to hear that Bernth is back with yet another one of his absurd acoustic guitar tests – one that flips his most bizarre experiment to date completely on its head.
For his latest video, Bernth has gone from no neck at all to too much neck, crafting an acoustic that, according to the YouTuber himself, is “the world’s longest guitar”.
To make such an instrument, the Austrian guitarist revisited some of his previous guinea pig guitars: taking his battered single-cut acoustic (the one riddled with drill holes), Bernth then attached two additional necks.
A fretless neck and a regular fretted fingerboard are affixed to the end of the acoustic via zip ties, with each additional appendage coming equipped with Bernth’s tried-and-trusted rubber band guitar strings. The longest scale length of any guitar ever? Probably.
The result is, to say the least, a bit of a beast – such a beast, in fact, that it needs two guitar stands to prop it up in a playable position. Put simply, the whole thing looks a bit intimidating: it can’t even be played by one person, despite what the video’s thumbnail would have you believe.
At a glance, the additional necks and their haphazard joins don’t seem conducive to a performance at all, but (Bernth being Bernth) the plucky player somehow managed to find a way – and, once again, somehow records an entire song in the process.
Dubbed Infinite, the single sees the six-string’s mastermind clone himself, with each Bernth copy taking up position behind each stage of the neck. Heavenly strums and two-hand taps on the body are complemented by percussive rubber band plucks and moody, low-end drones.
It’s a testament to Bernth’s seemingly limitless creativity, as well as his impressive technical ability to overcome the functional hurdles that his creations throw up. Now if we could just see this guitar up against Steve Vai’s Hydra in an epic battle of the guitar necks, that’d be great.
To watch the rest of Bernth’s bizarre experiments, head over to his YouTube channel.
