I’m thinking of getting a really crap electric guitar and removing all but one string so I could really dig in with a violin bow. I’m hoping to create an almost electric cello sound. I can’t afford even a student cello for this experiment.
So -
do you think. I would need to raise the bridge therefore making fretting the string useless? I’m guessing it would depend on the shape of the guitar’s body/bow accessibility.
The ultimate sound I hear in my head are really rich low E string bowed overtones. Almost like a super cool Indian tambura but LOUD!
And there there are pedals!!!!!
ManFromGlass wrote: ↑Sat Feb 15, 2025 4:30 pm
I’m thinking of getting a really crap electric guitar and removing all but one string so I could really dig in with a violin bow. I’m hoping to create an almost electric cello sound. I can’t afford even a student cello for this experiment.
So do you think. I would need to raise the bridge therefore making fretting the string useless? I’m guessing it would depend on the shape of the guitar’s body/bow accessibility.
I don't see why - Jimmy Page managed to play Dazed and Confused with a violin bow with all six strings still on board, and his Les Paul didn't have a particularly arched bridge to allow easy access to each string separately.
Online videos therefore suggest that you'll find it difficult to access any of the middle strings with a bow, but instead to angle your bow to play either the high or low E.
So, if you're only planning on bowing a single remaining string you ought to have reasonable access to bow it with the bridge at its usual height, and could probably leave both E's intact on your guitar.
And just to add to the conversation, I have a couple of Pickaso Guitar Bows I play on the harp: https://pickasobow.com
Designed more for acoustic guitars, but may be easier to manipulate, though not such a long bow as it were........
Given the sensitivity of electric guitars, how about using just one hair off a bow (rosined up), I remember a clip from Latcho Drom, where the Gypsy violinists were using this technique whilst sitting in trees (warmer than ground level).
Pickaso bow is cool - I tried one but I am looking for notes that are at least as long as a traditional bow rather than the shorter length of the Pickaso bow.
I thought of a spinning leather disk with rosin on it but using a cordless drill would be awkward. Anything longer than a cello bow and it’s hard to put enough pressure on the end farthest from the player.
Some to be invented device like a modified ebow that would have a velocity control on it would be super. The more pressure you put on the device the more it would dig in for those high velocity harmonics just like the real bow.
I think Eddie Phillips might have been one of the first to do this with The Creation, on the song “Making Time” in 1966. You can hear it every Sunday night at the moment if you watch The Great Pottery Throwdown on Channel 4
adrian_k wrote: ↑Sat Feb 15, 2025 8:35 pm
I think Eddie Phillips might have been one of the first to do this with The Creation, on the song “Making Time” in 1966. You can hear it every Sunday night at the moment if you watch The Great Pottery Throwdown on Channel 4
Technical Editor, Sound On Sound...
(But generally posting my own personal views and not necessarily those of SOS, the company or the magazine!)
In my world, things get less strange when I read the manual...
*skunked by Mr. Robjohns...I'd say great minds, but I don't have one...
Just wondering tonally if the e-bow might not be somewhere in the ball park. Massive sustain, mountains of harmonic enrichment and of course you can do whatever envelope shaping you need downstream. not free though and nowhere near the same affect from technique so maybe that renders the thought irrelevant
ManFromGlass wrote: ↑Sat Feb 15, 2025 7:49 pm
Some to be invented device like a modified ebow that would have a velocity control on it would be super. The more pressure you put on the device the more it would dig in for those high velocity harmonics just like the real bow.
I haven't used one myself, but surely the proximity of an ebow to the strings (and its position relative to where on the strings the harmonics would normally ring out) would give at least some 'velocity harmonics'?
Watchmaker wrote: ↑Sat Feb 15, 2025 9:42 pm
.... e-bow might not be somewhere in the ball park. Massive sustain, mountains of harmonic enrichment and of course you can do whatever envelope shaping you need downstream. not free though and nowhere near the same affect from technique so maybe that renders the thought irrelevant
the ebow sits on one string and electronically detects the vibration of the steel string, and then applies +ve feed back electro magnetic stimulus to produce infinite sustain.
realtime envelope control can be realised thru use of a pinky controlled volume knob. That performance technique is on my todo list.
It's not very responsive in terms of speed. A bow is so much more immediate.
The best dynamics on an EBow are from moving it closer to and away from a pickup. But even then there's noticeable latency. And on earlier versions of the EBow, moving it too close to a pickup gave an uncontrollable loud resonance. The later model (with the harmonics switch), is a lot more gentle when you're directly over a pickup.
N i g e l wrote: ↑Sat Feb 15, 2025 10:14 pm
the ebow sits on one string and electronically detects the vibration of the steel string, and then applies +ve feed back electro magnetic stimulus to produce infinite sustain.
No, an EBow simply vibrates the string when you apply it. There's no detecting of existing string vibration. It will happily start from a totally dead string and go to full output.
I think you may be thinking of the Fernandes Sustainer system which is a modified neck pickup and associated control electronics built into the guitar.
The (original) eBow needs to pick up some vibration from the string before it starts to excite it, it's almost impossible to avoid that when you place the eBow on the strings but if you don't do something positive to start the vibration the attack time will be very slow indeed.
Either way, it won't give anything like the attack of an actual bow.
If MFG did want to raise the bridge then I'd suggest adding a shim at the neck joint as well to create a correspondingly larger break angle.
Slow attack is the main reason my e-bow rarely sees use. I've moved on to using a poor man's imitation of the Sustainiac... Big Muff Pi after a fair bit of compression (EHX Tone Corset). Plenty of attack but it's a bit noisy. One of the things I like about that sound is it's always right at the edge of control and often does unexpected things. With enough practice and dialing in the fuzz/comp to taste you could probably wrangle a pretty fun approximation
Never liked E-Bow's, too cliched, it’s better to get an infinite sustain using other things, Fripp sounds like he uses an EB sometimes, but he doesn't.
Just get a plank of wood, some tuning pegs, and a few contact mic's, instant improv land, it's difficult to take all this further these days, in fact, impossible.
In the struggle to be different, the best thing to do is become more conventional, just wear different clothes, and ad even more reverb, that's what I'm doing.
I have an EBow and it's great, but it is strictly one string at a time and can't easily be used on the highest or lowest strings as ideally it needs to rest on the strings either side of the one you are bowing. The sound can be altered by where you place the EBow on the string length and the modern versions have two settings for accenting different harmonics. However overall the tone you end up with is very similar to that produced by controlled feedback, and if you want any dynamics you'll need to either use the guitar's volume pot (only really an option on Stratocasters) or invest in a volume pedal.
One of the guitarists from In Isolation uses the EBow on Light In Darker Times and Phantoms on our most recent EP.
Alternatively how about The Gizmotron? Allows bowing of all 6 strings simultaneously and the latest version appears to be a lot more reliable than the 70s original.
Last edited by BigRedX on Sun Feb 16, 2025 9:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
kashmir?
, i might be sometime....
