BillyG said
..............As it happens - here's my 4/4 fiddle restrung as a viola, playing outside, it sounds QUITE different - BOTH under the ear and to the mic - from when played and recorded indoors....  this was about a year ago... on holiday in the hills above Braemar - until I was interrupted by a hill-walker !    

I absolutely see the point of playing outdoors. The music is perfect for dancing, so why not going there with folks who like to dance to something like that?

Rosco said

Self-made bow... very interesting. Did you reference a specific pattern or historical piece while developing your bow?  

Yes, there are three 1600s style bows on the internet, made by Hagen Schiffler in Austria. Each of them costs around a thousand Euros, which is way too expensive for me, so I decided to make my own one. I cannot say I copied one of them, my model is probably a hybrid since I liked them all three. You can see all the details on Schiffler's homepage and enlarge them.

It is not difficult to make a 1600s bow with a clip-in frog. I solved the mechanical question with little wooden dents which hold the frog in holes while the hair keeps it down.

I started in May 2015 with a 79.00 Euro STAGG violin, the bow which went with it was terrible of course--very heavy. I don't touch modern bows since I made my own baroque bow. In October 2015 I bought a better violin without bow. Of course I went on using my clip-in bow.

Another upside: I can move the bow over the strings until the frog is behind them and end phrases very softly. There is no sharp edge which could hit and stop at the strings. Downside: the twine at the tip of the bow--sometimes I don't look out and it violently plucks my E string. There is a hole like a needle's eye where the hair goes through. One could solve that 'pluck' problem by fixing the hair in a different way....

Now I really-really want to play in a church. I had the totally dry sound in my rehearsal cabin a long-long time.

I have lots of choices if it comes to churches which I can reach with my bicycle here in Berlin. I need to find an organ player who loves musical experiments. I know there are some church organ players who are very open in this matter.

In summer 2015 I struggled with a terrible cheap bow, which I found too heavy. I researched baroque bows online and they were way to expensive. That's why I decided to make my own bow and make it very lightweight. What amazes me is the stability of bow hair on that bow without any screw to adjust it. First it has a pretty high tension which slowly drops, but then stays for many months in a lower tension which I find quite okay for playing. Even for over a year.