This Guy Built an Electric Guitar With Floating Strings and It’s Equal Parts Genius and Terrifying

If you thought guitars had peaked sometime around the invention of distortion pedals, a Swedish inventor just proved you very wrong.

A viral video from Mattias Krantz shows him playing an electric guitar where the strings aren’t mounted in the usual way at all. Instead, they’re levitating. Yes, floating in midair, held up by insanely powerful neodymium magnets that Krantz says can exert up to 550 pounds of force.

The result looks like something pulled straight out of a sci fi movie. The strings hover above the body, and because they’re not locked into traditional hardware, Krantz can do things that would be impossible on a normal guitar. He bends notes with his palm. He controls volume and sustain just by changing how close his hand is to the strings. It’s less “strum and shred” and more “conduct a magnetic field.”

But before you start dreaming about your own floating string guitar, there’s a catch. Actually, several.

Krantz is very clear about the risks. Those magnets are no joke. Get your fingers in the wrong place and you could seriously hurt yourself. He straight up warns about finger crushing potential, which is not a phrase you usually associate with music gear.

The strings also live a rough life. Because of the extreme tension created by the magnetic setup, they snap often, sometimes under double or more the tension of a standard guitar. Broken strings are basically part of the design process.

And yet, despite all that, Krantz still manages to play complex riffs and melodic lines on the thing. The sustain is wild, even if it comes with some strange tonal quirks. You can hear the instrument fighting physics in real time, and somehow that’s part of the charm.

The internet, of course, is obsessed. Some people are calling it the future of guitar design. Others are just impressed he still has all his fingers. Either way, it’s a reminder that innovation doesn’t always come in neat, safe packages. Sometimes it comes with floating strings, terrifying magnets, and a warning label that basically says “do not try this at home.”