Quote:
Originally Posted by Joel Terry
Travis, your post is fantastic--a real history lesson in a thimble. While I had heard of the Gizmotron in passing, I'll have to admit that I am not at all familiar with the Sustaniac/Fernandes-Hamer Sustainer. (I guess that means either: 1. I've been living under a rock and everyone else knows about the Sustainer; or 2. The Sustainer's manufacturer(s) didn't market it with conviction and/or could not find a high-visibility platform or effective integrated marketing channels to market it, so they lost interest in it because not a lot of players noticed it; as a result, the Sustainer has been relegated to the dim, cobwebbed attic of amplified music esoterica. I'll readily admit I'm going to feel really stupid if the former rather than the latter is true.  )
For years, I've been amazed that the "E-Bow X six" concept has been, for all intents and purposes, all but ignored. If I had any kind of predilection toward and expertise in electronics, I can assure you that I would have been tackling this very concept. It looks like the Moog guitar "g(o)t thar fuhstest with th' mostest." |
Kramer advertised the "Floyd Rose Sustainer" pretty heavily in guitar magazines in the late 80's/early 90's, but you had to play a Floyd Rose equipped Kramer to take advantage of it:
http://www.vintagekramer.com/sustainer.htm
Kramer went under after a few years, and Hamer started offering basically the same thing, licensed I believe from Maniac Music, who offered the Sustainiac as a retrofit for Fender-style guitars (and who also advertised in all the guitar mags at the time, although with 1/8th page b&w ads instead of full-page four color with Eddie Van Halen endorsing):
http://www.sustainiac.com/
Fernandes took up the cause after that, and I believe still offers the option. I have one of their Strat type guitars which has one. The effect is nice, but more akin to standing in front of a loud amp at any volume, with or without distortion. It does not offer polyphony--one note will always dominate, although that note will go to the octave harmonic if you've selected that mode.
Guitarist/producer Michael Brook is the first guy to come up with the Sustainer concept, which he called the Infinite Guitar. He has based his entire style around it, but could never bring it to market. He handmade three units--his own, one he gave to The Edge (intro to "With Or Without You") and the other to Daniel Lanois.
The "Ebow X 6" concept unfortunately requires six separate driver channels, a six-way pickup to read the strings individually, and I suspect six times the power of an Ebow, i.e. six times 9V. A lot of circuitry, difficult to fit into a guitar body without (I suspect) a lot of expensive custom components, and that's without getting into designing in any sort of touch adjustment, etc. Hence the long wait between someone thinking of the idea (probably about ten minutes after the intro of the first Ebow) and someone actually bringing it to market at the cost of a small car.