With my perspective put firmly in place I took advantage of the Swop Shop being open on Sundays and hauled ass there about 20 minutes before closing time to pick up a Plus Ebow. They had it listed for $175, which is a pretty decent saving on the price tag of ‘$200 and something’ that these things retail for.

So what do I think? First of all, before you go and buy one of these things, look up some info on how to play it. Then when you get to your local dealer, try it out in the store. I am frequently buying cheaper gear (sub $200), without trying it first because, a) Despite being open 7 days a week, I never get to the Swop Shop until it’s about to close, and b) I hate being that pretentious wanker in the music store, subjecting the other patrons to my 45 minute opus of multi fingered tapping and pinch harmonics.

The first thing that you will notice is that this thing will jack up the output of your pickups significantly. This is turn, can fuck up the perception that you have of what volume you’re currently playing at since you’ll need to adjust your sound levels to avoid blowing out your eardrums. One minute you’re rocking out some epic violin-like swells, then you switch to a pick to strum the chorus and you’re wondering what the fuck happened to your sound. This isn’t a negative point per say, just something you should be aware of if you’re the type of player who thinks the volume knob on his guitar functions as off and on only. At the very least, you should invest in a volume pedal, or learn to control the levels on your guitar.

That being said, you can get some pretty decent sound out of this thing once you get your head around where the hot spots on your guitar are. I’m not going to go into how the Ebow works (the fine people at Heet Sound have excellent documentation on pretty much anything you’d want to know), but from what I can visually see, the Ebow creates a more powerful sustain when it is directly over the magnets in your pickup, and a more mellow one the further away. I wasn’t too sure how it all worked, so I tried it out on my banjo and mandolin but due to the lack of magnetic pickups, the effect wasn’t as powerful as it was on the guitar.

The Ebow itself is designed with a groove on either side of a channel. The channel sits over the string you want to sustain, with the two strings before and after it sitting in the groove guides. The string then starts to vibrate, giving you infinite sustain. It’s really cool to look at. You can slide it up and down the string to get a nice swell effect, like a violin bow or you can hold it over the pickup and press it up and down to get a cool vibrato/trem effect, but by far the coolest use I’ve seen is to fret a chord and sweep it across the strings to get these sweet orchestral arpeggio runs. It’s seriously spine shiver inducing, and my personal selling point on the product.

Should you buy this thing? If you’ve ever wanted to know how to make you’re guitar sound like a member of the Violin family, or you need something that will provide infinite sustain for you’re 12 minute solo consisting entirely of hammer ons and pull offs, then yes. Buy it. Just beware that there is a pretty decent learning curve and a little bit of frustration required to get it sounding good.

N.B
I didn’t mention the harmonic mode on the Plus Ebow, because it’s kinda useless. It just adds some upper harmonics which don’t really sound that great.