re: #36 stpaulbear

I was thinking that the guys from 10cc invented the Ebow, but I was getting the Ebow confused with their Gizmo. It looks like they were both invented in 1969, but the Gizmo was never reliable so they quit making them. Did they do the same thing?

The gizmo was a mechanical version, using little spinning wheels and motors to ‘pluck’ the strings.

When I lived in Philly, a couple of friends worked at a company called MusiTronics in New Jersey (maker of the Mu-Tron pedal), which was working on development of the Gizmo re-named the GizmoTron. It was a non-stop headache for the company, it was an ‘intrusive’ install (meaning you had to drill holes in the guitar to fasten it), it was big and clunky, and after trying to get it into production for a couple of years they simply gave up on it.

There’s a company that’s making an updated version, but it still looks like if you installed it on a guitar it wouldn’t be of much use other than being a ‘Gizmotron guitar.’