MECHANIC AND SOUND

We finally succeeded in  going out a bow-maker workshop with two bows ! After the post of last week, you surely wandered around as Ulysses from one workshop to the other looking for “ a stony Ithaca” but once you step on it, you will realize that you just did halfth of your task. You have to pass the final test....that one of the bow, obviously.   

Apart epic and poetic jokes, after having excluded those bows showing gross curve mistakes and those with improper material, it is now the moment to understand the best bow among the selected ones from both the mechanical and sound point of view.
We will speak about sound in the next blog as it is very wide and complex, we will now concentrate on the mechanic. We continue from where we stopped. 
 
The steps to understand to which extent the mechanic of a tested bow is correct, are not very much different from those ones we followed while watching it, that is to say:

- Balance
- Force
- Stability
- Ductility

We can guess  the balance of a bow using a simple scale ( CURVE AND  BALANCE)  and I write “guess” because, as already told, the result of this test is not a very reliable one, but in fact we can understand it the first time we handle the bow and feeling its movement sensation. In fact, balance is just the beginning and the end of a bow and it should be intended in the wider meaning of the word, because it is the final result given by every  component : curve, weight, thickness, material etc.
For instance, if you handle a bow and you have the sensation to have the frog under the finger of your right hand in any position, most probably also force, stability and ductility are good as well.           

 
 Obviously each of us is different and has his own playing method but there is a system to understand if a bow is well-built, if this is the case,  it can almost “disappear” from your hands regardless its position. You can try to handle the bow with three fingers as you see in the picture at the opening of this blog and keeping it on its vertical  (pic. 1) try to find its baricenter. The bow is a very fine architectural structure based on strengths and weights and if it is well-built, you will find a point in which it will  literally disappear from your
hands, on  the contrary your fingers will have to  adjust the position continuously to keep it straight.

Strength: as already told, is the joining of weight, material and the quantity of the curve. The weight of the bow, as we all know, has a very tight relation with the material used to built it. Usually, if the material is a good one, the bow will be light and resistant, if it is of a poor quality, the craftsman  will be compelled to build a heavy one to obtain the same strength. Furthermore the strength is tied to the quantity of the curve, so if it is too weak or too strong for you, you can ask the craftsman  to give more curve or take away some amount until you will find the right one for you.         

It is important not to judge the strength of a bow too quickly. You can have the habit to play with a very strong  and not very well proportioned bow, that affected your playing method so you can risk to put apart one bow that has fantastic properties because you are accustomed to push in an exaggerate way to get a sound out of it. So you better listen how much is the sound produced by your bow and the new one; the best way would be to let a friend of yours play the bow and listen  to their sound  output from a distance of twenty meters, if possible.  If the new bow has more sound, maybe you feel it weak because you force it too much.

 Stability  is not an easy parameter to be detected.  If someone is looking for a bow, usually he is not satisfied with the one he already owns. He has the habit to play only with that one  and when he tries another one that plays well,  the most normal thing that can happen is that he doesn’t understand at once. For this reason, it is useless to start a test playing  a spiccato, as I often experience. You have to start getting acquainted with the new bow playing simple things and trying to understand how it moves, trying not to influence it with your way of playing, only after having played with it for a while you can gradually increase the difficulty of the bow strokes. In this way,  you can better understand  the mechanic of the  bow you are testing as well as if you have some vices in your way of pulling the bow.     

Recently a boy looking for  a bow entered our workshop so I showed him the only one bow left and he gave it back to me telling that it was trembling in the middle part. This bow had been tested by first level musicians,  both national and international, and obviously none of them had claimed about this defect, simply this boy had very  clear posture defects. He didn’t buy the bow, I have already sold it and just few days after the sale, the person who definitely bought it not only didn’t find any trembling but increased and improved a lot his way  of playing. The boy simply didn’t recognize that his way of   pulling the bow just gave the problem.       

Ductility is a peculiarity that is easily reachable with wood of poor quality but very difficult to get with a good one. The reason is very simple and it explains also why some ancient bows are well built but out of fibre so it is  very comfortable to play with them. An  excellent material  has a  very high sound velocity and consequently they are very stiff,  so the craftsman  must use all his skill to get out of it a bow that could be  ductile and homogeneous in all its parts. The perfect bow has not to be very stiff, it has to adhere to your will as much as you wish,  allowing you to manage  sound, colors and time in the easiest way possible.  

This way to test a bow, being very simple, will allow everybody, even the less expert one, a good selection method. The more expert will forgive me because they surely use more proper methods, but sometimes just trying new ways bring surprises-

So long  

Paolo