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Ebow is magically vibrating strings against the autoharp’s intended purpose.
In 2006, I purchased an autoharp so I could learn more about chordal relations. Autoharps are played by holding down a chord button and strumming at will. No matter what strings you touch, you will hear only your specified chord button. While useful in my education, I found that the sound of strumming didn’t fit in with the rest of my sounds. Enter the Ebow – what a fascinating device. It appears to be magic when the blue light mysteriously vibrates the strings without touching them. For me, the sounds from my autoharp were perfect from the Ebow, sustained and a touch dissonant. Unfortunately, with this new practice I had to toss chord theory out (since the Ebow only plays one string at a time). But, this system of sound gives me new ways to improvise and has carried me through quite a few shows. The sound clip here is made from live looping of an Ebowed auto-harp and field recordings from Chicago.
Click here for more on the Ebow
Click here for the history of the autoharp
this is very cinematic. it reminds me of tension
in a movie. well done!
Great sounds!
In my opinion it doesn’t quite stand as a composition by itself, but would make for very useful elements in a composition. For example, I can totally hear a flute and violin playing some disjointed melody above all this.
Do you use a magnetic pickup, mic or anything else on the harp? As far as I know it is not easy to work the ebow on acoustic instruments. Could you give some detail on the position of pickup/mic/ebow? Thanks for posting this.
Now I want to try, but damn what a simple/brilliant idea!
What about getting the other strings to resonate sympathetically despite only one being (bowed), e.g. by feedback? Hmm, tuned feedback, ala the tuned feedback circuit of the evolver, but chord-specific polyphonic style.
Excellent. I love this.
Sorry, it took me long to reply Aki, I got lost in comments! It was a Oscar Schmidt autoharp with a built in standard guitar pick-up. All very basic, nothing fancy.
Thank you Margaret. It is good to know.