Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about the bow. I've done all these podcasts for Fiddle Studio. I think this is the 50th podcast. If I release them in the right order, this will be number 50. That's a lot of podcast episodes, but I've never done an episode solely on the bow. For this one episode it will be Bow Studio podcast. The bow is very important for fiddling. It's half the battle there really.
When you start fiddling you really want to make sure your bow can hold rosin and I'll explain what I mean by that and loosen and tighten. This is pretty important to even just the fundamentals of getting a sound when I say you need a bow that can hold rosin. Sometimes bows are made. If the horsehair is a weird synthetic material or if there's a lot of oil on it, you can take the rosin and rub it up and down the hair and it just doesn't seem to be coming off. Use the scrape, your finger down the horsehair and there's none of that white dust on your finger. That's a problem. You want the hair to be picking up the rosin dust. I've come across a few bows like that in my day.
In terms of turning, check that the bow tightens and loosens and there's not something wrong with the end screw. It can get gunky in there and get hard to turn or it can just break and not work right. Why do we tighten and loosen the bow? Here's how I explain it to my students who ask me about this. The bow is carved from wood. That's how they were made traditionally and it's carved on a curve. If you take all the pressure off, it looks like a big smile.
Then if you turn the screw on the end to the right, so righty-tidy, it's going to pull the hair. It shortens up the bow hair and that pulls the curve up. The bow gets straighter. You straighten it to not quite exactly straight, but to I call it a Mona Lisa smile just a very slight curve. Use it like that to play the fiddle. But we don't leave it tightened like that. The reason we don't leave it tight is because you've put a lot of this pressure on the bow.
The bow is carved on a curve. But then you've pulled it to pull the wood straight and it makes it nice and bouncy and great for playing. But if you just left it, put it back in your case and didn't take the pressure off and let it loosen back to its original shape, it would start to warp so it would pull to one side or the other to relieve the pressure. Once it starts to warp it's either an expensive repair job or it could just be beyond repair. So we relieve the pressure by turning that end, screw back to the left lefty-loosey and it lets out a little hair which lets the bow bend back down and takes the pressure off. It goes back to its natural curve.
The rosin, the other important thing, helps the hair stick to the strings. I mean hair doesn't naturally stick to steel strings, it's got oil in it. If you think about human hair, it's got oil in it. I tell the kids, you know, with their fiddles, don't touch this horse hair with your hands, because your hands have naturally have oil on them and you'll just be putting more oil on the hair and the oil is not good. You want it to be sticky so it can grab the string and make it vibrate.
So you want to put the rosin on there and that will make it sticky, of course. I'm sure you can imagine if you make it too sticky it's also not going to work well. So if you accidentally put too much rosin on, just get a clean handkerchief and rub some of that off. If it's coming off in a cloud making you sneeze, that was too much.
Bows do need to be re-haired, maybe every couple years. If you're playing a lot, you might need to do it every year. I play a lot and then I forget, so it's probably every other year. They can do something to fix a little bit of warping. So if you left it tight and it's sort of bending out to the side and it doesn't look right, you can ask them. I think they like soak it and set it again. Sometimes you'll also need to get part of the winding or the pad done. That happens to me because I play a lot and I actually sort of wear the pad away. It's like the part right above the frog from my finger pressure. Maybe I'm pressing too hard on the pad there. I need to get that replaced every couple of years because I wear right through it from playing so much.
The materials they use to make bows. They have the horse hair and I guess I just read when I was researching this that they like horses from colder climates because they have thicker hair. So that's what they use for that. No horses were hurt in the making of your bow, yeah, it's just from their tail they get a haircut. I have to tell the kids that sometimes, because they're worried.
They use this kind of wood Pernambuco wood that has been used for bows for many years but unfortunately the tree that grows mostly in Brazil it's also, I think, the national tree of Brazil is endangered so it got all used up and they were using it for bows and they're trying to replant them now and kind of get the species back up and healthy. But there are not a lot of new bows being made from Pernambuco. So more often you'll see a bow made from sandalwood or Brazilwood.
Now Brazilwood kind of just meet. It's not an actual kind of wood. They're sort of, because Pernambuco is from Brazil, they're trying to say, oh, this is like that, and sometimes it's from like the outer areas of the same tree but it's not as good quality wood, or just from trees that are like that tree and grow in Brazil. So it can mean a lot of different things. It can be hard to know a little bit what you're getting with a wooden bow.
If you're looking at bows, you probably also want to look at carbon fiber bows. You know they make these bows out of carbon fiber now and they do a great job. They're very resilient. You know they hold up in humid and dry temperatures. They're not going to be affected as much by the pressure and the warping and everything. I mean you still want to tighten them and loosen them, but they're just not as finicky as wooden bows.
I still use a wooden bow. They average about 60 grams. So bows come in different weights and I use a heavy weight bow. So my bow is maybe like 63 grams, but people will use them 57, 58. It's not a huge range. If I was playing a lot of Mozart, I might have a lighter bow, but I play just a lot of really heavy styles dance, fiddle, Klezmer and I love having a heavy bow. I feel like I don't have to put as much muscle down into the string to get a really big sound, and my sound is big. I mean it might not sound that big on this podcast. If you're in the same room the kids like they cover their ears. My violin is pretty loud.
It's hard to predict what kind of bow is going to sound best with your violin and for the way that you play your violin. So you really want to take your instrument to a shop and try a lot of different bows and if you have a couple favorites especially if they're different weights or different styles see if you can bring them home and try them for a week and then go back and try some bows again, see what feels good and what sounds good, and if you can bring a friend, listen to them play with the different bows. But really it will be up to the way that you play on your instrument.
There's a bow out there that'll probably sound a little better than the others Bows I did do. If you're looking for bow grip information, there's an episode on bow grip. I think it's episode 35. You can go check that out.
Our tune for today is the New Five Cent piece, also called New Five Cents or just Five Cents. This is the tune about five cents. It's a Cumberland tune, sort of the border region of Kentucky, Tennessee, so that was in the mountains and then also found in Missouri. I'll talk about that a little. In Kentucky it was played by the fiddler Isham Monday, born in 1879. And I guess, played this tune. He tuned his fiddle so low that even though it was a D major tune it sounded like it was in C. I don't know why that would be. Maybe it was really humid.
That's a story I heard about Cajun fiddling was that it was humid and that the fiddle wouldn't stay up, so they ended up just tuning them down. That's why they'll do that. It's like a G flat, d flat, a flat and E flat, slightly torturous for someone with perfect pitch.
Mark Wilson said this tune is called Buffalo Nickel in the Ozarks and dated it back to about 1913, although it could be older. There's also an early recording of the tune by Paul Wormack and that was 1928, recorded it as five cents. There's a lot of fiddling in Missouri.
You know I live in Maryland and I know a lot about the old time fiddling. That was kind of done in the mountains, western Maryland and Western Southern Pennsylvania and it kind of goes all the way down through Western Virginia and down into Kentucky, Tennessee, and there's a whole genre of fiddling and different regional fiddlers there, North Carolina, but there is also a lot of fiddling out west in Missouri. They have all their own regional styles.
I have some family that's from Missouri and also a lot of family from kind of north of there. In farm country in Iowa, all along the river there was a really big hotbed of different cultures. So they had a lot of French and German immigrants, a lot of Irish workers for the railroad, also African Americans, Indigenous Americans. There were a lot of different kinds of people and the fiddling tradition kind of reflects that.
They had a healthy culture of dances, competitions and local radio and then they would also pick up tunes that were coming from the radio in the mountains. I talked in another podcast about Arthur Smith playing it on the radio in North Carolina and then the tune may be getting picked up in Missouri from that.
If you're interested in learning more, I would check out Howard Marshall's books. Howard Marshall, great Missouri Fiddler, and Family live there for a long time and then later became basically like a scholar of the history of fiddling in Missouri. So I'm not sure I'm saying it right and you know, because I have family there I remember that they would say it kind of Missoura, but because I'm a Yankee girl, I can't quite say it right. I'm still working on Baltimore. Anyway, we are going to play this tune, Five Cent Piece, and this is going to be the Baltimore version. Okay.
Thank you for listening. You can find the music for today's tune at fiddlestudio.com, along with my books, courses and membership for learning to fiddle. I'll be back next week with another tune for you. Have a wonderful day.
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