Keep Your Bow From Bouncing

Does your bow bounce when you don’t want it to? These 4 tips can help you achieve a smoother more desirable bowing technique.

1) Pulling the bow rather than pushing it – with flexible fingers.
2) Keeping the instrument a little higher, even if it’s only an inch.
3) Turning the bow inwards slightly for more of a shock absorber effect.
4) loosening the bow.

In the same way you paint with a standard brush, you want to pull the hair behind. Let the bow follow your hand. Practice bringing your fingers inward and outwards for more finger flexibility.

The higher the instrument, the less you need to stretch your hand to play in the same spot on the bow. Even if you learn to keep your instrument just one inch higher, you’ll have slightly less tension in your hand. This is tension that can cause your hand to tremble and the bow to bounce.

While it’s not always suitable to play with the bow turned inwards, it’s very suitable when playing softly which is one of the times that we bounce the most. Turning the bow inwards creates a shock absorber by creating less tension at the first edge and more as the hair bunches up. There are many degrees of turning the bow based on what you are playing. Experiment to find the perfect angles for what you are playing.

Lastly, experiment with bow tension. If you are not playing so hard that you feel the stick grinding against the strings in the middle of the bow, you shouldn’t have any problem loosening the bow. Depending on the strength and stiffness of your stick, you could probably loosen the hair quite a bit without any negative effects.

This entry was posted in Fiddlermans tutorials. Bookmark the permalink.