I've heard him use it before, but I don't know what his tricks are. Good old Wikipedia says he uses light gauge strings when he employs it, so that might be all it takes. My guitarist and I messed around with it at band practice once with no luck, but I think that was on a bass with a standard sized set of strings.
could be the light gauge strings or could be the custom ZON bass he plays has both regular pickups as well as several piezo pickups mounted throughout the body and neck
he's using 2 ebows in that one, plays Adhan on just 2 strings.
notice it takes a while for the ebow to get the strings going.
He doesn't really use the ebow much, i think he just did it because it wasn't designed for bass. He's got a reputation of doing things he's not 'supposed to' :)
I have one, it works fine for bass. It's basically a little electromagnet powered by a 9v battery
The response time is a little longer with bass strings, but it's powerful enough to get the low B string going on a 5 string bass
It's pretty situational. You can use it to play swells (like a volume pedal would do) or you can use it to keep a note sustained indefinitly, or get some nice legato going.
There's a trick to getting it situated just right tho, since it was designed for guitar, the string spacing on the bass poses a challenge.
They're pretty fun tho, go get one and play around with it :)
Are you going to try one out? Let me know what kind of luck you have if you do; I like the idea but just didn't have much luck in the short time I spent with one.
I don't, but I wonder if they might actually work better with an Ebow. One of the worries is trying to use something designed to move guitar strings to move much heavier 'objects', so strings containing less ferromagnetic material might be easier to move. Hmmmm . . .
