Musician trolls piano tuner by swapping his piano strings with guitar strings

4 November 2020, 15:29 | Updated: 4 November 2020, 15:39

Playing string swapsies on instruments, to find out how it sounds.

Ever wondered what would happen if you replaced an essential part of a perfectly fine instrument with something from another? Just how would it sound, for instance, if the guitar shared a bit more musical DNA with a piano?

Plucky Swedish musician Mattias Krantz wanted to find out how his guitar would sound with some strings right out of a piano. First, he cut the strings from his piano and then reinforced his instrument so it could hold the increased tension from the larger strings.

Then, Krantz wound the strings onto his guitar, and the moment of truth was near. Things unraveled slightly, however, when he found the weighty strings exceedingly difficult to tune.

At first, he spent 25 minutes trying to tune his guitar, but then let the strings time to adapt to the new positioning. The guitarist said after four days they began to stay in tune. Check out the process, and how it all sounded, below.

Read more: MILOŠ names his five all-time favourite guitar pieces >

I PUT PIANO STRINGS ON GUITAR

Krantz found that the new strings strummed adequately, but required a lot of pressure to depress on the fretboard. He ranked the overall experience 2/10. Harsh.

We actually reckon it sounded rather good – the more wieldy strings gave lots of buzz and action.

Guitar strings on a piano?

Given that Krantz now had a piano short of a few wires and some spare guitar strings to hand, you can guess what he did next. What goes around comes unwound...

But before you enjoy guitar strings fixed inside a piano, here are some fun facts. There are over 230 strings in every piano and many notes have three resonating strings each, for added volume and richness of sound.

Each string in the piano is under a tension of up to 90kg, meaning that the instrument contains around 20 tonnes of tension. Which explains that heavy metal frame inside.

Here’s what it sounds like with a little swapsies....

I PUT GUITAR STRINGS ON A PIANO

And the art of a (good humoured) troll

For a bit of comic confusion, Krantz called in a piano tuner to take a look at this instrument, not revealing the true story behind his bizarrely bespoke instrument.

What would the techy pro make of it?

I Put GUITAR Strings on a Piano and then Hired a Piano Tech to Come Fix it

Seems he worked it all out pretty quickly. Perhaps those pranking skills could do with some fine-tuning...