At the 2015 NAMM Show, inventor Paul Vo was previewing the Vo Wand – a tool for playing guitars in new ways.
Vo is the inventor behind the Moog Guitar and the Vo-96 Acoustic Guitar Synthesizer. With both instruments, Vo explored his concept of acoustic synthesis – controlling individual harmonics within a string’s vibration to synthesize new types of acoustic sounds.
The Vo Wand
With the Vo Wand, Vo is taking the technology he developed for the Vo Guitar and making it inexpensive and portable. The Wand lets you precisely stimulate and control the vibrations within a string. By adjusting the position of the Wand, you can control which overtones of the string’s fundamental frequency are emphasized.
Vo also mentioned that the Wand wasn’t really guitar-specific. He said it could be used with other string instruments or even to vibrate other types of objects.
The Vo Wand that he was demonstrating at the Show was a prototype. He plans some further functional and design refinements before moving it into production. He expects that it will be priced around $200.
If you’re interested in the Vo Wand, there’s a contact form at his site for getting further information.
so… an ebow?
Maybe an ebow on steroids?
This looks like it will be WAY more playable.
It also sounds like he may be bringing some of his technology over from the Vo-96, which lets you emphasize or de-emphasize specific harmonics, which can affect the sound a lot. It wasn’t clear from the demo if that’s the case or not.
I thought the same thing. An eBow is so specific about positioning that it is pretty impractical except for its kind of narrow use. Hard to switch target strings, etc.
This thing having the squeeze to change frequency & power is interesting. In his demo, it did seem to make the string have a weird resonance. It’s a cool sound, but not like a real bow in any way. Would be kind of cool if the vibration of the string would somehow influence the frequency of the wand– but that didn’t seem to be the case from what I was hearing.
I didn’t mean to hate on it or anything. Looks like a more practical version of an ebow, like you said. I guess i just don’t understand what is so revolutionary about this.
The amount of control is cool… But from what I saw, it is underpowered. It does not actually seem to drive the string anywhere near as well as an e-Bow or built in magnetic sustainer. I will probably preorder one, as I am a sucker for such things, but… From the video, Vo needs to give the device more power for it to be as effective as it should / could be.
I have watched the video a bunch of times and I am truly excited by this, but my original power critique stands. He really had to work to get some of those notes to gain any energy. I am sure it will be a practice sort of thing to find what works. Great idea, which I think will be an AMAZING product in Version 2.0… Still going to get in on this on the ground floor… Even if I see some room for improvement… This is a must have bit of kit for my 10 string, 7 octave guitar!
Yawn … I don’t care about this. I just wish he make THIS readily available:
http://voinventions.com
$200? I’m there. Admittedly I haven’t tried it, but adding haptic feedback sounds like a brilliant move.
It may seem underpowered or whatever — but he basically said they weren’t shipping till summer and he didn’t even have a definite date for preorders. It may very well be that the long lead time involves fixing those very things.
Looks awesome to me!
I was ready to bag this, but I think it could be a useful color in some of my arrangements. I’ll have to try it out.