The eWhammy Is Here

The eWhammy Story

This is one of those ideas that looked simple on paper but, in reality, took a fair amount of development time to reach full maturity. The concept was straightforward: use a standard whammy bar, in this case a genuine GOTOH trem arm, including its arm socket. Mount it on a spring plate with just the right amount of flex to mimic the feel of a traditional trem, then attach a magnet underneath and use a Hall effect sensor to measure arm movement.

At its core, it’s a controller. It doesn’t do anything on its own other than generate a proportional control voltage (CV) that you route to whatever you want to control.

It’s non-contact and not tied to the bridge or strings. It does not change string tension, so tuning stability and sustain stay intact.

When paired with a high-quality pitch shifter (hardware or software), eWhammy can preserve precise note intervals across strings, so chords can retain their harmonic structure while pitch shifted. Traditional tension-based systems struggle here because each string responds differently.

eWhammy also isn’t limited to a single function. Pitch bend is just one application. And it isn’t limited to guitars. It can control other instruments and systems too, including keyboards and synthesizers.

Sounds easy, right? But it took four years to develop, on and off. The Hall effect approach was established early on. At first, we used push-pull springs for the mechanism. Later, I decided to make the plate itself the spring.

The refinements came in trickles: small details that only surfaced through prototypes, testing, and iteration for robustness and usability. If you’d like the full backstory, here’s a list of articles on the eWhammy’s development, in historical order:

1. The E-Whammy
2. Spring-less E-Whammy: Proof of Concept
3. The E-Whammy: Evolution
4. The E-Whammy Explained: What It Is (and Isn’t)
5. The E-Whammy : Center Stability
6. The E-Whammy : Center Stability Take Two
7. The E-Whammy: Controls