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Ok,,,, luff.... if you look at a strand of horse hair under a super high powered microscope, you'll see the hair looks like it has scales. By only playing without rosining will eventually clean the rosin from the surface of the bow, but small amount's of rosin still remain in the scale's of the hair. It's like having a hole in a piece of wood and putting wood filler on the wood then scraping it off, the remaining filler stays in the hole. In order to get a new complete surfaced you need to remove the old wood filler from the hole, same with rosin. Am I clear on that, do you understand my point?
Many year's ago, a man who raised horses told me that his horse's with white tail's and mane's, he used Corn Starch on the tail and mane to clean and whiten the hair. He also told me that's how they cleaned the "Budweiser" Clydesdale horses. DOn't know how true it is but I can't dispute him, because I don't know for sure.
When I clean my bow's with alcohol, after they are completely dry, I only apply enough rosin until I get a nice smooth sound. Too much rosin is defeating the purpose, it rub's off on the string's and then you get the scratchy sounds.

Honorary tenured advisor

You have ansered your question -- if you put too much rosin on the bow it just rubs off on the strings and then starts to build up on the surface of your Violin. Then all you have to do is clean the strings off, and the Violin. Once you get the bow rosined up you don't have to rerosin for quite a while. Just listen for bad sounds. I reapply rosin after 2, 3, even 4 hours of playing. Enen then I only stroke the rosin about 6 or 8 times.

Member
Ehh... I think I know about this... Dark rosin is awesome.. I actually using it now...
About rosin.... I usually use 1 - 2 bow stroke on my bow ( too much is not good.. I can't handle it =.= )
And about cleaning... You can clean it with alcohol... but put alcohol far from your violin and never let alcohol go in to the surface... or you'll pay for it ..... Just clean it right after practice/perform and if it build up too much, use coin, put the coin with angle of 30 and slide it softly through the build up place.
Have fun
Violin - My Life - My Style - My love






Would I be correct in thinking that it would be good to clean the bow-hair with alcohol if one changes brand/type of rosin, then?
My newer bow was only used with the newer dark rosin I got at the same time, but with reading this thread I have started thinking of cleaning the older bow that came free with the violin to try it with the darker rosin since it seems to work better.
I am thinking that at the worst, I might mess up the hair badly. But that isn't such a concern to me, since I have a hank of hervex (I think that's the name anyway, synthetic bow hair) that I got for trying re-hairing my bow when it eventually becomes necessary. The hervex was cheap, and I figured that if I mess up I can feel better about messing up a bit of synthetic than I would if some poor stallion in Mongolia was going around bare-butted for nothing..LOL
"This young wine may have a lot of tannins now, but in 5 or 10 years it is going to be spectacular, despite the fact that right now it tastes like crude oil. You know this is how it is supposed to taste at this stage of development." ~ Itzhak Perlman
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