I built the Smallest Most Adorable PLAYABLE Electric Guitar In the World !

Here’s the story of how I created the Smallest Playable Electric Guitar, channeling the limitless power of undiagnosed ADHD.
It is 28cm (11’’) long, it has two strings (C-G), a functional pickup, a custom made bridge, 12 frets, and it plays!
The one piece body is made of maple, the top and back are walnut.

I’m well aware that the world record for the smallest guitar ever created is 10 microns long (1997, Cornell University), and technically one can make the string vibrate, but let’s be honest, it’s not playable in the common sense. It’s not a dig at the researcher who made it tho … But mine actually plays.

The guitar was made between January 7th 2023 and January 23d 2023. I remember that the idea suddenly popped into my head and I immediately drew the plan: the limiting factors had to be the size of the pickup (for the body), the size of the mechanics (for the head), and the size and number of the frets (so it’s playable with human fingers).
I briefly considered only installing enough frets to play the pentatonic scale but then the guitar would have looked unnatural so I kept 12 anyway.

During two weeks I dedicated all of my free time to this project.
When the guitar was over, I was pretty satisfied with the silly thing, and called it a day.
The plan was to make a demo, post the video, and move on… But I never recorded anything and let the guitar collect dust for another 2 years.
In the meantime I built a lot of other instruments, mostly for my kids (5 and 8 now), to get them to play the guitar and bass. The building of my daughter’s bass is featured on the channel, and I think it’s way underrated.

It was only recently that I remembered having built the Smallest Playable Electric Guitar Ever Created. Which is funny when you consider that it’s been sitting on my desktop for 2 years. It was actually my daughter who recently asked me about it. I told her that I built it, so we watched the raw footage together, I explained to her how I made it. It was only then that I realized three things:

one - It had been 2 years, and not “a few months” like I imagined. I realized the power of procrastination in an instant.

two - It’s not a goofy video, the making of the guitar involved real woodworking, and I had forgotten about that. I thought this was going to be a “filler video”, not a real build, but even though it’s slightly shorter than my other build videos, it actually is a real Tchiks build.

three - The build is actually interesting! It explores the physical limitations of making an instrument this small.

So I picked up the thing, plugged it in my amp, started to play around with the effects, realized that with a C-G tuning I could make power chords, that the 5 first frets of each string could make a nice pentatonic, and that the intonation after the 7th frets was kind of wacky (it can play in tune if you have tiny tiny fingers though), the problem being the size of a human finger. So I simply took one old riff that I wrote and recorded a demo and finished editing the video.

A friend of mine asked me why I made this guitar and I answered that I probably had something better to do. I think that's how my brain works. Whenever something feels overwhelming, important, stressful, whenever I'm struck by decision paralysis…, my brain automatically gets side tracked by something completely different.
Here's a few examples :
I built my first guitar just before the birth of my son
I made “the shelf guitar” to keep my sanity during the pandemic
I made “the Ikea guitar” because I couldn’t choose the “right” red for the Red Special
For this build, I couldn't shoot a proper thumbnail for YouTube and I promised I'd post this video on Friday … so I built an even smaller guitar. It took me an afternoon because I already had a one pole pickup (don’t ask me why).

Procrastination is beautiful.

Stay tuned for the next build !

There will be more demos and pictures of this one on :
Instagram.com/tchiksguitars

Bisous !

Tchiks