Ebow

[Curtin, Steven D (Steven)]

> Anybody know what the circuit inside an Ebow looks like?
> It's encased in epoxy & at $100 a pop I'm not really interested
> in sacrificing it.  There's obviously a couple of
> eletromagnetic transducers (one with a magnetized core) and
> an 8-pin integrated circuit (I'm guessing some kind of
> op amp, but which one?) on a tiny PC board, but
> I'd like more detail.  I want to build an Ebow-controlled
> zither, but the requisite 50 or so ebows are too pricy to
> ponder.  On the other hand, I'm fairly well tricked out for
> winding pickups & assembling circuitry.
> 
There are a couple of other people who have built ebow-like things.   The
basic idea is that you use a pickup as a speaker magnet, and apply a signal
to it instead of reading the signal from it.  Micheal Brook made his own
system like this which he calls the "infinite guitar".  Nicholas Collins
uses cheap guitars and driver coils to drive the strings which he calls
"backwards guitar".  Fernandes bought the rights to a device that looks like
a pickup but also does string driving.  I hear that there was an article by
Collins in Guitar Player around '94 where he describes how to build a
"backwards guitar" sustainer.  He also does things like apply a voice signal
to the driver to make the guitar "talk".  Good luck with your project.  If
you use the small type of string drivers that Collins uses you could get
them closely spaced together enough for your zither.

Steve C

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Steven Curtin  
Lucent Technologies Microelectronics
ph: (732)957-2996   fax: (732)957-6878
http://www.emf.org/subscribers/curtin/
sdcurtin at lucent.com
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