Misusing the eBow

eBowing a tensioned cable on a fence gate. I mean, doesn't everyone spend their Sundays doing this?

The eBow has been around for decades, and it does one thing only, albeit very well: It excites metal objects with a magnetic field. It’s meant to be used to get synth tones out of guitars, and used right, it can be beautiful.

“Used right” usually doesn’t apply when I get my hands on such things.

Having purchased an eBow this year, I didn’t sit and play my guitar with it. Instead, I switched it on and walked around the neighborhood looking for guitar-string-like objects that might make even more interesting noises.

I came upon a fence gate that had a tensioned cable secured with a turnbuckle (to keep the large door from warping). While I could barely hear the cable resonate, I could also hear the wood of the door vibrating. To my mind, that meant only one thing: contact microphones.

As you can see from the photo, I taped one contact mic to the turnbuckle, and another to the door. I didn’t want one on the cable to decrease its oscillation. I tracked each contact mic to a separate channel on my field recorder.

I recorded about 16 minutes of pretty interesting tones, but the audio levels were quite low. The hums and drones were nice, but I liked it even better when the cable would strike and vibrate against the eBow itself, adding a sound like metal being stretched and warped. It sounded like a much more aggressive Alan Lamb recording. Perhaps someday I can use it expressively as a layer in some transformative or warping sequence, and certainly chopping it up to microsample it will yield untold button sounds, clicks, wonks, vrrrmmms, and other sonic sweetness.

I layered some of the more dynamic, expressive parts into a short clip that you can check out below.

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[Piezo contact microphones into Sound Devices 702]