So, Landscape Ferrous.
The first thing is, it’s not an eBow. Those use a pickup and electromagnet to create feedback to encourage and extend vibration — like pushing a child on a swing when they reach the apex, to keep them swinging further and longer.
Ferrous doesn’t have any sensors; it’s just 6 small magnets on a rotating disk. So it’s like pushing the kid at timed intervals. If the timing matches the kid’s motion (or is 1/2 the speed, or 1/3, 1/4, etc.) it will boost it, otherwise it will dampen it.
So you can’t hold it over strings and then play a melody on the frets normally. But you can hold it over a bunch of strings, tines, etc. and tune in different resonant vibration modes, and that’s what it’s all about. You can control the speed with a dial, a button, an inconveniently placed touch sensor (in most cases it’s going to be face-down above strings… hmm) or a CV input.
So it works best when you have a lot of vibration modes available in a small space and the subjects are eager to resonate freely — e.g. lots of open strings in a small space, like on our bowed psaltery, or lots of available harmonics in multiple pitches, such as a kalimba or acoustic guitar (with its relatively longer strings). It’d probably be fantastic with an autoharp, a hammered dulcimer, or a piano.
It’s kind of boring when there’s less to work with, as on a mountain dulcimer, steel tongue drum, or bass guitar. You can get sine waves and maybe simple chords, but not a whole panoply of potential frequencies to sweep through… and they tend to be fairly quiet too.
Holding it at the right distance is a bit tricky. You want it as close as possible without colliding — but it’s got magnets that want to pull toward the metallic object(s) you’re working with, and a vibrating string/tine needs a lot more space than an inert one. You also don’t want to hold it near an electromagnetic pickup unless you just want to hear the hum.
There’s a weird thing it does with the kalimba (and a lesser extent, other instruments) where if the frequency isn’t just right, it’ll still excite the thing but bend the pitch. So the low C tine on the kalimba might be happy to play Bb or D — and if you hit C dead on, the whole thing rattles like mad. It takes some finesse!
But what’s even better is that experimenting with this had me dusting off my old lap steel guitar. I bought a used Rogue Jersey Lightning several years ago out of curiosity, knowing that some other ambient musicians used them on occasion, but I found it was awkward to work with given my setup at the time. So it’s been sitting idle. But now, since I have things ready for a bass guitar or kalimba with minimal fuss, the lap steel is also no trouble. With reverb and other processing it is extremely suitable, so it’s going to join my stable of occasionally-used instruments.
There’s been some buzz about the new Waldorf Microwave 1 plugin, because it’s extremely similar to the original hardware. I gave it a spin, and though I do like some of the lo-fi sounds it produces I really don’t find its UI much fun to work with. And I don’t need another software synth…
But it did get me thinking about wavetables again. I used to be really into them for a while, first with Serum (and sometimes Massive), then Disting bridging the way to SynthTech E352/E370. Shapeshifter, despite using wavetables, got me a bit away from that because I saw its tables as a secondary feature, and of course more recently I moved to RYK Algo instead.
So I fired up some older plugins. Vital is awfully good for a free synth, and its spectral morph and distortion parameters offer some cool stuff. But I reinstalled Serum and found inspiration there, despite it not being much like Microwave at all. Whatever works!