About a year ago I hade a friend over for some jamming att my house. The guy, Holger Thorsin, was wagging with an Ebow i front of me and asked if I had seen such a thing before. Ebow, for what I know now, is a super cool tool that was invented in 1969 by Greg Heet. I had never seen such a thing before in my life and I was stunned about how it sounded. I can't understand why I hadn't bumped in to this super cool playing technique before. Maybe it says something about my real ability to keep track of cool stuff? Embarrassing thought ha ha.
Nevertheless, the gadget, which is battery powered, has magnets that create an electromagnetic field that makes the string to vibrate and to create harmonics captured by the microphone. The result is an almost endless "tone" that of reminds of "sustain". You change the character of the "tone" by moving up and down the neck, wile playing the guitar neck as usual. It sound amazing.
Guitarists who have actually played Ebow over the years is, for example, Eddie Van Halen and U2's The Edge.
I tested the thing. It wasn't really that easy to learn how to handle it though, but my friend spun off like a cat on his Gibson SG. Wonderfull melodies and amazing sound-effects just blew my mind. It's hard to actually explain how Ebow sounds, but you can check out the YouTube-clip below, it might help you to understand what you can do. The guy playing is Phil Keaggy a real super pro.
Phil Keaggy is otherwise best known as an awesome "finger-picking" guitar player, considered by many as total genius. He is well worth checking out in general.
Go grab the Ebow Zombies....
//The Guitar Zombie
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