Making your guitar sound like other instruments

Hey ppl.

I wondered if anyone knows what type of equipment you need to make your guitar sound like other instruments.

I saw a Bill Bailey DVD (english stand-up comedian, hilarious by the way) called 'Part Troll' and he had an acoustic guitar which he played, but with the use of various footswitched etc he could make it sound like a banjo or pan pipes and overlay strings on top of his acoustic guitar sound.

I'm assuming it was some sort of midi pickup run through a hideously expensive setup, but if anyone knows of equipment which is dedicated to this purpose would be much appreciated. :D:D:D

I just joined the forum by the way, so Hi. :-)

There's a whole bunch of ways.
You could use a guitar synth which makes your guitar compatible with any midi instrument you want.
You can use effects plug-ins such as spektral delay and get all kinds of stuff.
You can also use VST synth plug-ins as the effects input for your guitar.
Just use the effects portion of the synth to use whatever was included with it.

you can use an e-bow, which makes the string vibrate with magnetic fields...and then makes a very very cool sound

You could do the yngwie thing - put on some distortion and some delay, then pick the note while the guitar's volume is all the way down, then bring the volume up with your pinky after you attack, for a bow across strings effect.

Also if you have some very smooth distortion and an octave pedal, you can make your guitar sound like an organ but doing some classical tapping - check out Azrael's transcription of the fugue in D minor. Play that, but with an octave pedal (set to an octave lower). It's surprising!

There's also this new "pick" called the jellyfish which can be found (I'm pretty sure) at jellyfish.com, which supposedly changes your guitar sounds a lot. Sounds like a racket to me...