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Rubber bands, gauze and tennis racket dampeners: how TikTok hacked the rubber bridge guitar
Artists like Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridgers have been using rubber bridge guitars to create unique guitar sounds, but DIY artists have had to get more creative…
Phoebe Bridgers performing at BST Hyde Park in 2022. Image: Dave J Hogan
It appears on Taylor Swift’s Folklore and Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher, and in songs by Olivia Rodrigo, Lizzy McAlpine and Paris Paloma. Madison Cunningham has one. So does Orla Gartland. The rubber bridge guitar has come to define indie music – from folk to pop to rock – in the 2020’s, and its muted sound has become highly sought-after.
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The rubber bridge guitar was popularized by Reuben Cox’s Old Style Guitar Shop in Los Angeles. Cox, a photographer, does not play guitar but learned how to build and repair them. While taking photographs of Andrew Bird and producer Blake Mills in the studio, he saw Mills’ 50’s Harmony electric banjo, which had a removable rubber stop to mute the strings. Cox made one for Mills in two hours that night, using flatwound strings, a humbucker pickup, an 80’s Squier bullet neck, a plywood Telecaster body, and rubber gasket blanks from Home Depot. Cox knew The National’s Aaron Dessner, who ended up getting one and using it on Swift’s Folklore and Evermore, and eventually gifted Swift one.
Not all artists can afford to purchase a new guitar or to modify one. But musicians online have found ways to get the rubber bridge sound, without a rubber bridge guitar. Guitarists share hacks on TikTok, finding things to wrap around the strings or place next to the bridge whether it’s rubber bands, gauze, a sponge, rubber tubes, mattress foam, tape, toilet paper, or a sock. “Bitches will put anything near the bridge of their guitar to make it sound muted,” one user said. “It’s me, I’m bitches,” they said before sliding an old pair of underwear under the strings.
@johnny_gerson Rubber Bridge basically for free #musicproduction #rubberbridgeguitar #taylorswift #phoebebridgers #evermoretaylorswift #folkloretaylorswift #punisherphoebebridgers #jackantonoff #aarondessner
Turn to tennis
But content creator Ricky Young recommended another hack, which became popular online. Young makes YouTube videos and TikTok content about recording and production on his AudioHaze channels. He does a series on how to replicate the sound of different artists. For a video about achieving Phoebe Bridgers’s style, he tried out different hacks, including a foam clamp and a rubber tube, as an alternative to installing a rubber bridge on a guitar. “That’s a really invasive, expensive and permanent modification to your guitar,” Young says in his TikTok.
A producer friend of his plays tennis and recommended a tennis racket dampener, used to absorb the shock from rackets. In the video, Young holds up the Babolat Vibrakill (which sells for £8.47), without knowing it was a tennis accessory. “When I bought it, I thought I was buying something for a guitar, and I wasn’t,” Young tells Guitar.com. This small strip of rubber conveniently has six slots for strings.
“It’s hard, in one sense, to get that purist perspective, and it is expensive to get that purist perspective,” he says. “But I think if people open their eyes to see multiple avenues to get to the same end result, then, all of a sudden, there’s a lot more economy in thinking like that.”
Especially when the feel of these guitars is a trend. “That percussive quality, I think, is becoming more and more desirable in indie folk,” he says. “And it’s almost like a banjo in some sense.”
It’s a small change with a big impact. “When you think about just the act of putting a piece of rubber on a string, it has an emotional response to it,” he says.
He also says it gives the music an older feel. “People spend a lot of money to make it sound like they haven’t spent a lot of money,” he says. “It’s an aesthetic, for sure. It’s like ripped jeans, it’s aging your stuff.”
From rubber bands to rubber bridge
Singer-songwriter Michael Isaak used the rubber band hack while recording his song North Star. “I had a Katana amp with a built-in delay, and so I put a quarter-note delay, and then plugged in my acoustic directly into the amp with the rubber band on it, and it created this really cool, plucky texture, that sounds really good for atmospheric purposes,” he says.
Since then, he’s purchased one of Orangewood’s Juniper rubber bridge guitars. Launched earlier this year, these parlor-size models, complete with flatwound strings and rail humbucker pickups, are priced at $395. “I think it’s made me much more expressive in my playing, because you have to fill out the space a lot more,” Isaak says.
It affords him versatility. “I feel like I do a lot more fingerstyle, a lot less strumming,” he says. “And my strumming is more for percussive effect.”
Isaak is of Egyptian heritage and his songs incorporate influences from classical Arabic music. “I’m actually thinking of adding frets to my rubber bridge guitar so that I can play in microtonal Arabic scales,” he explains.
To him, the rubber bridge sounds similar to an oud. “I was messing around… with a metal slide on my rubber bridge, and playing in a scale called Bayati, which is one of the oldest Arabic scales… It’s a really interesting sound. So definitely, I want to use the rubber bridge for more Arabic music,” he says.
@michaelisaaktunes Try out this hack and tag me! 🪕#rubberbridgeguitar #guitartok #taylorswift #invisiblestring #phoebebridgers #singersongwriter
Modify it yourself
Jacob and Chelsea Hamilton, who make up the band Wendlo, have been using their rubber bridge guitars to record covers for TikTok alongside original music. “I think what we found right off the bat was that it seemed to create more space for us vocally,” Jacob says.
Jacob liked how the rubber bridge guitars offered a different sound without the use of pedals, amplifiers or other gear or effects. “This was something that was built into the guitar that made it sound unique,” he says.
Jacob has been modifying his guitars himself, fitting them with rubber pieces from Home Depot. He first tried it on a hollow body electric guitar with a tune o’matic-style bridge. Later, he went to Guitar Center and found a cheap acoustic guitar – a $75 left-handed dreadnought. “There’s a lot of rubber bridges on parlor-style guitars,” Chelsea explains. “This has such a deep tone… It always has been [a] super-inspiring instrument for us.”
Jacob has now modified parlors and electric guitars as well. “Our voices occupy this specific range together, and then the rubber bridge Tele is baritone… so it’s a really good accompanying instrument,” Chelsea says.
“It’s almost like a third voice, on its own,” Jacob adds.
@wendlomusic long live the @Queen 👨🏻⭐️ #wendlo #cover #rubberbridge #duo #harmony
They’ve covered Billy Joel’s Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song) and Queen’s Somebody to Love. “We like to take piano songs and try to… reimagine them on the rubber bridge guitar,” Jacob says. “Because, for whatever reason, it feels like playing a piano to me.”
But they’ve been able to use it on a number of covers across genres and eras including Earth, Wind & Fire’s September, Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams and PinkPantheress’s Ice Spice collaboration Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2. “With [the] acoustic rubber bridge. I think there are certain parts that sound almost orchestral or cello-like, so it’s fun to try… to sneak it into a recording or an arrangement, either as the featured instrument or… you can subtly layer it in, and it can sound like so many other things,” he says.
Jacob says the guitars he modifies sound even more muted than the Old Style ones. “It’s fun to experiment,” Chelsea says.
“There’s no right way to do it, because it’s all wrong to begin with,” Jacob agrees.
Aliya is a freelance music journalist and has written for Alternative Press, Billboard, Kerrang!, NME and Stereogum, along with other publications. She specializes in covering alternative music and writes about the intersection between music and internet culture. She has been playing guitar inconsistently for two decades.