In my earlier years as a drummer and improviser, I was obsessed with Gerry Hemingway’s Electro-Acoustic Solo Works (84-95) where he blended percussion and electronics to compose a body of work. Following this inspiration, I spent the next decade exploring unconventional ways of playing cymbals and drums with found objects, homemade instruments, tape players, contact mics, and speakers. Admittedly, the experimentation process at times wasn’t the most “musical,” but more importantly, it activated my curiosity and imparted to me the importance of playful exploration, in music and in life. When this curious spinning magnetic polyphonic string resonator named Ferrous fell into my hands, I instantly experienced that familiar desire to be playful, and quickly arrived at sounds that, to me, were undefined and new. A true gift.
The Ferrous is a collaboration between Landscape and SF-based sound artist/instrument maker Evicshen (Victoria Shen). The body is made from birch ply and the top interface from their signature light green PCB/fiberglass material, with beautiful gold traces throughout. The mechanical variable speed wheel inside is a repurposed hard drive motor housing an array of neodymium magnets. Turn it on, the disc spins. Hover it over a steel stringed instrument like a guitar, piano or zither, and suddenly the strings start resonating and produce a range of sounds from ethereal beauty to dark and haunting. It’s quite a simple device, but between the choice of instrument, object, proximity, speed, and velocity of acceleration or deceleration, the possibilities become infinite. The documentation expands well on examples like these, as well as Ferrous’ polyphony concept, coined as “magnetic strumming,” defined by a string resonating at a fundamental tone but also producing additive harmonics. Polyphony, however, is just the beginning of its sound world.
Ferrous has four different methods for motor control: an on/off variable dial, a low profile momentary/pulse button, the touch plate, and CV input (yeah that’s right, control from a modular!) The on/off variable dial allows defining very specific, constant speeds, while in contrast, the pulse button will slowly ramp up speed, which is effective for bursts of speed velocity (kind of like the pulse setting on a food processor). The touch plate is quite responsive, though I wasn’t able to achieve the full range of speed, and the CV input is an excellent twist. In my first CV attempt, I connected a XAOC Devices Zadar envelope generator and selected a random sample and hold-like modulation, and the magnetic disk responded accordingly. Suddenly I’m in a modular, electro-acoustic, CV controlled world. Sequencer, LFO, ADSR, keyboard? The opportunities here for integrating control and sound source into a cohesive ecosystem are really vast.
To expand on this idea, I connected a microphone to an envelope follower on my ARP 2600m and then connected that output to the Ferrous. This enabled the gain from the microphone signal to control the speed of the magnetic disc. In turn, as Ferrous causes an instrument to resonate louder, the microphone picks up more signal, causing the CV control to increase and creating a nice symbiotic, CV feedback-like relationship that is really fun to manipulate. Taking prompts from the Ferrous manual, I sandwiched two neodymium magnets on the edge of my 22” ride cymbal. At low speeds, the Ferrous shook a bit, what with negotiating such an opposing magnetic field, and the cymbal started to wobble and flutter. I held the mic up close and heard a beautiful drone beginning through the ARP's built-in speakers. As the sound built up, the magnetic disc speed increased as the cymbal again started to flutter faster, until it resonated with a metallic moan, pitch bending and constantly shifting from low to high, loud to soft, while I moved the proximity of the mic to manipulate the intensity of the signal of both audio and CV. This envelope patch is simple and certainly nothing new, but when paired with the Ferrous, the results are just beautiful.
Next, I attached a magnet to both sides of a gong in a position I was sure would respond well after having first explored it with a mallet. The most challenging part of this was trying to hover over the magnets without getting too close to the gong, but still close enough to enable a reaction. Moving on to acoustic guitar, using the pulse button yielded the most compelling results as it swept through the harmonics, creating a cascade of haunting, ethereal sounds. Opening up my old Everett upright piano, I held down the sustain pedal and placed the Ferrous as close to the larger wound strings (C3 and below) as I could, and set the Ferrous to a consistent low speed. This really activated the string, and wow, it was really loud! Mic’ing the string on the lower section of the piano, away from the Ferrous, allowed me to capture sounds in a recording with little to no motor noise and made me want to dedicate an entire score to this kind of sound world. Soon, every steel surface and object in my studio was eventually vetted and explored with the Ferrous.
On top of my own explorations, I’ve enjoyed seeing how the community of users are also continuing to find new use cases for Ferrous. For example, I saw that Hainbach discovered that it can demagnetize a tape signal by running over a long, exposed tape loop, whereupon it created a cacophony of sound wherever it crossed paths with the Ferrous.
Ferrous comes with a 9 volt rechargeable battery (via USB C) and I’ve found battery consumption is efficient and so far a non-issue. There are rubber feet that can be mounted to the face where the front plate screws reside and these act as bumpers to prevent the magnetic disc from colliding with your instrument or allow it to sit face down on a fretboard or resonating surface. Of course, this could interfere with the quality of the sound production, but it’s on the user to be creative and use ingenuity to solve these challenges. Compared to the Ferrous’s counterpart, the EBow, the biggest downside is probably the motor noise, which objectively is quiet, but can be detected if the instrument is being amplified with a microphone. Hence, creative implementation of pickups will likely be your friend here.
Do make note: Ferrous spins fast, it's magnetic, and the disc is fully exposed. Though I feel completely safe using it, at times it can collide with your instrument. So far, I’ve experienced no damage, but take precautions that there are no loose magnets nearby when you’re experimenting. Ferrous is a wonderful tool. It can augment your arsenal of instruments and create new ones you didn’t even know existed. Start exploring, enjoy playing around, make mistakes, and record all of it. 
Price: $225

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