Tilting the Bow (Half Past Four)

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Welcome to the Fiddles Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus Beller. Today I'll be bringing you a setting of Half Past Four from a jam at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about tilting the bow. We are really getting into the nitty-gritty here. I love these topics. I am by now you probably know who I am. I'm a fiddler and a fiddle teacher and a Suzuki teacher. And yeah, violin teachers talk about tilting the bow. 

Have you ever thought about whether your bow tilts, whether you wanted to tilt? Did you know the bow can tilt? I don't think I thought at all about the tilt of my bow until I was in college. I mean not seriously. So I'd been playing yeah, I don't know over 10 years. Hadn't thought about it. All of a sudden, my college teacher is saying what are you doing with your bow? Why isn't your hair flat? What's going on with the tilt of your bow? 

It can have a big effect on your tone if your bow is tilting, for two reasons. One is the amount of horse hair touching your string. More hair on the string is going to be pulling the string, making it ring more. Also, more hair on the string can make more bow noise. Add more of that sound of that scraping hair on string to your tone and then sort of the third thing that can happen is that if your bow is tilted one way or the other, it can start to slide in that direction. The sliding can also affect a number of different things, including your tone. Yeah, where your bow is kind of on the highway, the tilt of your bow comes from your hand. So we're talking about your bow grip here and you can play around with it. You know, get your bow out, put it on the string and try kind of sliding. It'll feel like you're sliding your thumb forward or back. So you're I mean your thumb's on your bow, but you're pushing your thumb out away from you a little bit and tilt your bow and now you're going to have less hair touching the string. Or you can pull your thumb in closer to you, tilt your bow away from you. Now there's less hair touching the string. 

I hope I said that right. You can tilt out or you can tilt in. So which one do you think the classical players like if you said tilt out ding, ding, ding. You are right. So for classical they want your stick kind of tilting away from you a little bit so you're playing on the farther away part of the horsehair. 

Part of the reason for that is that classical players really need to hug the bridge, get as big a sound as they can. I mean there's a reason there's so many violins in an orchestra and only three or four trumpets. Violins are not that loud and especially if you're a soloist playing trying to be heard over an entire orchestra, you want to get as much sound as humanly possible. And the closer you get to the bridge you get more and more sound. Of course, if you get too close, uh-oh, you're going to be scratchy. So they will tilt the bow away and that keeps the bow moving up towards the bridge. So you have to control what's happening. But if you tilt the stick towards you and you're using the bow hair closest to you, well now your bow is going to skid in the other direction, skid away from you, down towards the fingerboard. That's not going to have the best effect on your tone. So people classical players will tilt that stick away and keep their bow up hugging the bridge. So the tilt is kind of pushing the bow towards the bridge, but of course it's uphill. The strings are coming up to the bridge, so the the bow wants to go away from the bridge because of the hill coming up to the bridge. But in those two things combine to kind of keep it close to the bridge, but not too close, if that makes sense. So to get more sound, people will still try to use more of their horsehair on the string. This is keeping your bow very, very flat using all the hair. 

I mean it can get more sound, or you can just get more sound with less effort. You'll see this if you get your bow re-haired and then all of a sudden your sound is bigger and you're not working as hard. Or if you realize you need to put rosin on and all of a sudden your sound is bigger and you're not working as hard. The sound isn't coming from the hairs on the bow, remember. The sound is the vibration of the string and then the wood and air also vibrating and magnifying that. You could get the same decibel level of sound using a lot less bow hair tilted, but maybe you're like pressing really hard into the string or you're using all the bow hair. You could get less sound because you're just not putting a lot of weight into the string. It's gonna have an effect on your tone and what's happening and you do kinda wanna you don't wanna use a lot more effort than you need to. 

Let's say, playing the fiddle is not the easiest thing on your body, so let's not work harder than we have to work. You can try using more of your bow hair. If your bow is usually tilted, that might help. And I would say it's common for fiddling to play with more of the bow hair, probably for that reason. Just more sound, less effort. People will tilt for an effect, especially if they have a little bit of a jazz bent. In jazz and in some fiddle styles people will try to get more variety of tone. So they're not maybe just going for playing the tune very rhythmically, but they're also trying to get a lot of different tones and colors out of their violin. And you'll hear them do that sort of zzzz, getting really close to the bridge or falling really far away from the bridge, getting different tones that way, tilting the bow a lot, just using a little bit of hair. It's different things you can do. So, yeah, experiment with that, rolling your bow, grip back and forth, see if you can use more or less hair. You just wanna know what's happening. If you're not using a lot of hair on your string, try using more. Tilt your bow a little bit differently, see if that helps. It's something to be aware of. You know in your toolbox. 

Our tune for today is called Half Past Four. This is a traditional old time tune from Kentucky, West Virginia area. We played it at our jam. I looked it up on the traditional tune archive. That's a website I use a lot and they had a version from Bruce Molsky, collected from Ed Haley. Yeah, maybe I'll talk about both of them. 

If you don't know Bruce Molsky, he is a fiddle banjo teacher at Berkelee School of Music, which is the college in the US where you can study this stuff for college. He also travels around and performs and teaches. He started playing fiddle and banjo, I think, as a young adult in the 70s, and this is just my impression of Bruce. I'm barely mad at him. I'm not close to him, but he seems like the kind of person who just gets hooked into research and can't stop himself. So a lot of people got into fiddle in the 70s. They learned some tunes and then they'd play them at home or with their friends and that was great. So I think Bruce started that way and he learned some tunes and then wanted to research them and then learn more tunes and then wanted to research them and then wanted to research the fiddlers they came from and then learned their tunes and then researched those tunes and then researched those areas where they were living. And so he's the kind of person just to listen to him talk about these different fiddlers and their styles and where they traveled, where they performed, where they recorded. He has like a PhD level knowledge of these different areas and pockets of old time music where they were happening, down through from Virginia down into the Southern Appalachian mountains. Yeah, if you have a chance just to go here and play different styles and talk about him, it's really fun. So this one I guess he he got from from the playing of Ed Haley. 

Ed Haley, born 1885 in Logan County, west Virginia. His father was a fiddler and his grandfather too. So there you go, fiddlers in the family. He was really well known. Was he blind? Yes, he was a blind fiddler, that's what I thought. And he played around. He didn't record a lot. They said he didn't record because he was worried that record companies would take advantage of him because he was a blind man. A lot of research into his playing and his music came from the musician John Hartford. So that was in the 90s and Hartford collected a lot of tunes and and researched Haley's life and his music and promoting that and sort of sharing it with the world in the 90s and because of that we're playing some of these tunes from him, including this one. It is in a Half Past Four. Yeah, here we go.