Charles Beru picked up the spinning guitar for the first time and held it at arm’s length, studying it the way a surgeon might study an instrument that had no business existing. ‘Looks like something out of Terminator,’ he said. What Mattias Krantz and his collaborator Adam had built was, by any reasonable measure, unplayable: an 18-string instrument with a 360-degree motorized rotating neck and a foot pedal to control the spin. The problem was not the engineering. The problem was finding a human being who could actually use it.
From Millennium Park to a guitar store basement
The search started in Chicago, on the logic that if anyone on earth could handle a spinning-neck bass, they would probably be found somewhere in that city. Millennium Park was the first stop, and a crowd formed almost immediately around the strange-looking instrument. Curious strangers reached for it, turned it over, tried a chord or two, and handed it back. The talent, as Krantz put it, was ‘definitely hidden’ in those crowds.
A few blocks away, a street bassist was already performing. Krantz asked if he wanted to try a special bass for the next song. The musician passed. Then a passerby materialized out of nowhere and told Krantz he had seen the guitar online just two days earlier, which was enough social proof to get the bassist to attempt it. His verdict was blunt: ‘It’s not practical.’ But he did point Krantz toward a few musicians further up the street, and those players were considerably more enthusiastic about the first-ever public performance of the spinning guitar.
From there, Rob Scallon brought the crew to a legendary local guitar store where professional players regularly gathered. A staff expert picked it up, stared at the motor, and offered what he called his expert opinion: ‘I want one.’ Down in the store’s basement, a pro guitarist named Nathaniel was already at work. He and the other professionals experimented hard, one using a slide to navigate the curved neck, Scallon retuning the instrument entirely so he never had to fret the strings at all. But even seasoned players were struggling. ‘It’s so hard,’ one of them said, ‘because it’s moving.’ The guitar was behaving less like a guitar and more like a completely different instrument that had borrowed a guitar’s body.
Three days locked in a room with the impossible
Krantz flew in Charles Beru, widely regarded as one of the best bass players in the world, and gave him three days alone with the instrument. Within five minutes of their first introduction session, Beru had already produced something that stopped everyone in the room cold. Three days later, he walked out with a full performance.
He had worked out three techniques no one had discovered before: navigating position changes mid-phrase without breaking rhythm, playing strings on the back of the neck with his thumb while simultaneously playing the front, and a spinning harmonic that Krantz had not imagined was physically possible. Beru was direct about what made the instrument hard: ‘Any time you’re doing intervals where you’ve got to go over a few strings, the curvature gets more exaggerated, and that’s just a really weird feel.’
Late in the final session, the guitar’s wiring gave out under the strain of a full day’s playing. Krantz and Adam calmly added it to their running list of improvements for a version two.
The biggest bass string in the guitar’s history
Charles Beru stared at the lowest string on the instrument the first time he held it. ‘That is like something from an airplane or something,’ he said. Nobody disagreed.
Somewhere in Chicago, Krantz has notes for a second version of the guitar, and Charles Beru’s room is presumably a little quieter now. The spinning neck keeps spinning in the background, waiting.
