Dental floss as guitar strings? It works – but only just
Bernth Brodträger’s YouTube channel has become a well-stocked emporium for guitar-playing oddities. Who else can attest to a portfolio in which they play an acoustic guitar filled with water, light fireworks in a guitar while strumming and hook up to a functioning guitar amp submerged in a vat of water? No-one, that’s who.
Indeed, every time the Austrian shredder shares a new video, we think he’s reached the end of his seemingly endless list of ideas of how to trigger traditionalists.
Well, turns out we were very, very wrong. In fact, Bernth might actually be nearing his final form, releasing a video that sees him swap regular electric guitar strings for, erm, dental floss.
Though no doubt a useful aid to combat fretboard gunk and keep your guitar smelling minty fresh, dental floss has absolutely nothing going for it in terms of tone or playability (obviously). That, and mint oils are notoriously bad for the fingerboard.
Bernth being Bernth, though, somehow manages to make the minty strings sound as clean as they smell without any long-lasting damage, masterminding a unique way to play to the floss’s strengths.
We use the word “strengths” loosely, because there’s not too much to love about the shrill-sounding dental floss. Here, it's all about the way Bernth manages to use them to churn out coherent melodies.
Some nifty string pulls to easily alter the tension help with some atmospheric soundscaping, while standard fretting exchanges, speedy scale runs and even some heavy open string riffing help showcase the floss’s clean, albeit slightly harsh, tone.
It’s not the first time Bernth has experimented with strings, either. In a previous video, he recreated everybody’s childhood music experiment by using rubber bands as guitar strings.
For our two cents, the bottom-heavy rubber bands edge out the dental floss – that ultra-light gauge here sounds like an absolute nightmare for the untrained player – but we most certainly won’t be putting either on our best electric guitar strings round-up anytime soon.
File this in Bernth’s trophy cabinet of wild playing stunts, right next to the drilling holes into the body of an acoustic and inflating a balloon inside a soundhole.
That’s not to say Bernth hasn’t been responsible for some more conventional videos. In fact, he recently embarked on a noble quest to prove the merits of cheap gear by wielding a $90 acoustic at the Guinness World Records’ largest-attended music festival.
So, has Bernth reached peak Bernth? Well, owing to past lessons, we highly doubt it.
