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The EBow is a fantastic guitar effect, albeit one that requires some skill to use effectively. I had one previously that I loved when I took the time to work with it, for it’s ability to generate long sustaining notes, without using distortion or compression, on a clean or dirty sound guitar signal. The ability to initiate notes without the attack of the pick was cool too.

Some information from Wikipedia:

The EBow or ebow (brand name for “Electronic Bow” or Energy Bow) (often spelled E-bow in common usage) is a hand-held, battery-powered electronic device for playing the electric guitar, released in 1976. Instead of having the strings hit by the fingers or a pick, they are moved by the electromagnetic field created by the device, producing a sound reminiscent of using a bow on the strings. Some sound clips are available on the official EBow site.

The EBow is used to produce a variety of sounds not usually playable on an electric guitar. By varying the EBow’s linear position on the string, the player can produce different string overtones, and also fade in and out by lowering and raising the EBow. Furthermore, starting with the current generation of ebow (PlusEbow, aka 4th edition Ebow), Player also gain an additional mode known as harmonic mode, which produce a higher harmonic sound instead of the fundamental note.

An early pioneer of EBow playing was Bill Nelson, who introduced it to Stuart Adamson of The Skids. Adamson went on to use it heavily with Big Country, and it formed an integral part of their well known “bagpipe sound”. Blondie, Tom Petty and Blue Öyster Cult were also early users. The EBow has also been a familiar element in the sound palette of guitarist Phil Keaggy since the early 1980s. Béla Fleck has used one on an acoustic banjo in concert, also creating a bagpipe like sound. The 80’s band A Flock Of Seagulls had used the ebow in two of their songs off of their 1983 album [Listen] in the songs Wishing (If I Had A Photograph Of You) and The Fall. Australian band The Church make extensive use of the EBow and featured an EBow solo in their 1988 hit single “Under the Milky Way.” The sound of Robin Guthrie of the band Cocteau Twins is partly derived via the EBow and a host of effects pedals. Billy Howerdel of A Perfect Circle has been known to use an Ebow to replace sythesizer parts with guitar as he did on the 2000 album Mer de Noms, where he had stated that almost no synthesizers were used on the entire album.

While the EBow is not normally used with the electric bass guitar, which has heavier strings, Michael Manring (who uses light bass strings) has persevered, and it features heavily on his 1995 album Thönk. He has even been known to use two at once. Steve Willett of Strange Boutique helped pioneer the use of bass EBow in the 80s post-punk goth scene.

Although the EBow is most commonly played on the electric guitar because of the ease of use and the responsiveness obtainable from the pickup, it has also been used in applications with the steel-string acoustic guitar. For example, Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour used one on his Gibson J-200 acoustic in the 1994 song “Take It Back” to great effect. Generally an acoustic guitar gives a limited response for varying reasons, including the density and spacing of the guitar strings. But despite these limitations, using an EBow on an acoustic guitar gives a rich, flute and clarinet-like tone with a slow-swelling response.

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