Aum Guitar Prana Pedal & Slide Saddle

The Aum Guitar Prana Pedal is outwardly identical in connections and features to the pedal that came with the company’s original Vibraslide, the brainchild of Aum Guitar’s Gareth Whittock. Bearing some comparison with devices such as the Ebow and Sustainer guitars, the original Vibraslide used a hand‑blown glass slide that connected to the pedal via a thin and flexible mini‑jack cable. Whereas an Ebow houses both the pickup and string drive transducers, the Vibraslide used the output from the guitar’s own pickups as the source, amplified the signal within the pedal, and then fed it back to the strings via a transducer within the slide. Like a Sustainer guitar, the Vibraslide was able to drive all the guitar strings at once.

This new system sees the pedal in a new green livery, but the key difference is in the slides, which are now available in glass or metal. Rather than the electronics being inside the slide, they are now attached to a small box fixed to the side of what’s referred to as a Slide Saddle — this can be worn over a finger in the traditional way, rather than having to be held like a lap‑steel guitar bar. However, if you want to use it as a lap‑steel bar, you can, and the box section provides a useful handle. The strongest signal occurs when the box is on top of the slide rather than off to one side, but rocking the slide as you play provides a means of controlling the sustain intensity. As the slide can activate several strings at once and is just about long enough to cover a seven‑string guitar, it could be interesting to experiment with alternate tunings.

The pedal requires a standard 9V, 300mA or higher, centre‑negative PSU (not included), and a quiet, well‑regulated supply is preferred, because a poor‑quality supply can feed noise to the slide. There’s an on/off footswitch on the left of the pedal linked to a white status LED, while the rightmost switch operates a polarity inverter, which emphasises fifths or octaves (most noticeably on the lower strings), rather like the second switch setting on an Ebow, and in this mode the LED turns red.

A Pre knob sets the level of the guitar feeding the pedal, and if this is set too high there will be audible distortion — which may or may not be a good thing, depending on whether you can find a use for it! To the right is the Sys knob, which controls the level of the guitar signal being fed to the slide. The guitar connects, via the pedal’s in and out jacks, to its usual amplifier, but there are two further jacks on the rear panel that function as an effects loop, allowing other pedals to be inserted into the signal path. These don’t affect the guitar sound directly but do affect what’s sent to the slide, giving rise to some interesting possibilities. For example, a wah pedal can change the overtones in the sustained sound.

The resulting sound can be very different from that of an eBow, and not only because multiple strings can be sustained at the same time...

In use, it’s possible to feel small vibrations from the slide, and picked notes will sustain indefinitely if the Pre and Sys controls are set sufficiently high. If set too high, it becomes harder to control the strings that you don’t want to hear vibrating, so it’s useful to damp unwanted strings where possible when playing. I prefer these hollow Slide Saddles to the Vibraslide and, although there’s a box and cable attached to the tubular slide section, it soon becomes second nature to position this somewhere comfortable. As with the original Vibraslide, the resulting sound can be very different from that of an Ebow, and not only because multiple strings can be sustained at the same time but also because it is possible to pick a string to produce a conventional attack and then have the note sustain.