And it sounds pretty good too…
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In a nostalgia-fuelled new video, a guitarist has replaced his strings with rubber bands and, surprisingly, the end result is pretty impressive.
The footage was released by popular YouTuber Bernth Brodträger and shows that, with enough determination, rubber bands can make a pretty decent substitute for real guitar strings.
Released on Sunday (26 February), the two-minute-long video has already proved to be a hit with the guitar community – racking up over 750,000 views at the time of writing.
Since forming his channel, the guitarist, who goes by the username Bernth, has captured the attention of countless players for his experimental videos.
In the past two years alone, the YouTuber has pushed his acoustic guitars to extremes – including flooding an Ibanez model to capture some ethereal underwater tones, and setting off fireworks from the soundhole of another.
It is with his latest development however that the musician embarks on a more nostalgic experiment, mastering something that we all thought was impossible as kids. Replacing the bottom three strings with elastic bands, Brodträger has written a track called Elasticity, which he considers to be the “world’s first rubber metal song”.
“I used rubber bands as strings to record my new song,” he wrote in the video. “Stretching them results in pretty otherworldly sounds, [for example,] when they slam the guitar, it sounds like a church bell.”
In the footage, the guitarist also explained that the most difficult aspect of the project was ensuring that each string stretched to the correct pitch – something he could only do by relying on his ears.
Surprisingly, the makeshift strings make for some impressive Gojira-inspired riffs, and were durable enough to last for the whole duration of the song.
Stream Elasticity now on Spotify.
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