Quote related to 'Get Down Make Love' from 'News Of The World'

To tell you the truth, I don't remember using an E-Bow on Good Company, though it was a long time ago and I could possibly have forgotten!! As I remember it, I did it all with the small Deacy amp, with microphones placed at various places relative to the speaker cone, depending on what tone I wanted the part to have, plus in some cases a Wah Wah pedal set to a particular place in its range, to colour the sound, and for some sounds, a volume pedal to vary the attack of, say, the trombone. I DID use an E-bow on stage though. It was very useful for starting off my long solo at one point. I could make long Whale-like noises by gently moving the device up to a position over a low string. Along with use of the Tremolo to zoom the pitch way down, and the delays I was using at the time, it gave a lot of scope for building up weird textures. I really enjoyed it if the mood was developing well that night. Usually at some point after a couple of minutes I would lob the E-bow in Jobby's direction, and lay into the guitar with a pick instead, going into more rhythmic areas. I don't know what happened to my E-bow - haven't seen it for years. Must get another one to play around with!!! The reason I didn't get heavily into it as a technique was really because I always liked to produce sustain by feedback through the air. This is quite controllable in one way, since you can move around the stage to get different degrees of positive feedback to keep the sustain going, but it's also quite exciting because unpredictable things happen - the sustained note may burst into another octave or a higher overtone. Mr. Clapton used to use this to great effect in his days in Cream. I used this too a fair bit in the early days, notably in the stage intro to Stone Cold Crazy, and later, along with a fed-back harmoniser, in the solo section of Get Down Make Love.

Brian May; Official Website, 6th of January 2004