BUYING YOUR FIRST BOW
Strings Magazine - December 1998

The French term for the bow is "baguette," which is fitting, since a good bow is as essential to an instrument as good bread is to many a cuisine. People spend so much time trying to find the right violin, viola, or cello that they often give short shrift to its better half. So after you've chosen your first good instrument you should repeat the winnowing process for the bow.

But don't try to shop for an instrument and a bow at the same time, or you'll drive yourself nuts. The process is complicated enough when you're simply trying to choose an instrument. If you add the separate winnowing process for chosing a bow, you run the risk of hopelessly confusing yourself and deadening your ears to the subtleties of a given stick. It's far better to break down the instrument and bow-shopping process into two stages: first look for the instrument, then for the bow that suits both it and you.

Lydia Rose, a Minnesota bow maker and cellist, says it is just as important to look carefully for the bow as it is to find the perfect instrument. Like instruments, no two bows are alike. "They're much more unique than instruments are. So I hear people play on the same instrument with the same bow and the bow will sound quite different in each person's hands. You have to go by how you feel," says Rose, who studied bow making in Belgium with a French maker.

Today's players have a lot to choose from. Comtemporary makers all over the world are producing bows of excellent quality that are lower in price than antiques. And many players consider carbon-fiber bows for a first good bow, though not as investments. Nearly indestructible, composite bows are getting favorable reviews for the sound as well as the price.

If you're looking at, say, a $2,000-$4,000 violin, you should be looking at least a $500 bow, she says. And based on her experience working in violin shops and watching people test instruments and bows, she finds that for $250 or $500 more in a bow, you can make your instrument sound $1,000 better. The money actually goes a lot further in a bow than it does in an instrument, Rose contends.

Minneapolis instrument dealer Claire Givens estimates that if you take 15 to 20 percent of what you're investing for an instrument, it'll buy you a comparable bow.
"That's the minimum you should go with, unless you have some really serious budget constraints. I've heard other people say 30 percent. So if you're buying a $5,000 violin, you should be looking for a bow (costing) maybe $750 to $1,000," Givens says.
Bowmaker Roger Zabinski, of St. Anthony, Minnesota, says the first and most overwhelming consideration in selecting a bow is sound. And although opinion is greatly divided on this point, Zabinski advises people not to buy something solely for the sake of investment. "Don't think about how much you're going to be able to get out of it when you sell it. Because it's not an investment, it's a musical instrument. A lot of people do consider that, and I think that's a mistake. It's an unnecessarily complicating factor," he says.

You should be aware, however, that others deem a bow's investment potential as important as its condition and quality. Before buying, consider how important a bow's resale value, or ultimate worth, may be to you in several years.

When you're buying a bow made by an individual craftsman, you may want to find out if the maker has entered competitions and how well they've done. This can help you establish some sense of reputation and determine the quality of the person's work. Then get a feeling for the draw of the bow from frog to tip. "How does it feel end to end, just on an open string? Is the sound connected end to end or does it change and make you have to change pressure and speed to maintain the same kind of sound? How does it draw?" asks Zabinski.

Look for a bow of moderate strength and flexibility. With very strong bows, you lose a lot in sound quality and nuance. And with one that's too soft, you lose control. If you're torn between one that's light and one that's a bit heavier, go for the lighter one, Zabinski says. You'll get clearer trebles, more delicacy.

Remember that it takes at least a day to get adjusted to the feel of a different bow. A player will tend to gravitate toward a bow that feels like the old one, even when the new one is of better quality. Typically, the fiberglass or cheap wooden bow a student has been using has poor balance and is not lively in the hand. (A step up would be a bow of either brazilwood or higher-grade pernambuco.) Trying a more responsive bow can be unsettling.

"If you get one of these bows that has really nice balance, it can feel light, and if it's really lively, it can feel like it's going all over the string."

When you're looking for a bow, there are several characteristics that change how it feels in your hand. The first one is weight. So for a violin bow, the optimal weight would be between 60 and 65 grams, although 65 is really heavy. For a viola bow, it's between 70 and 73. A cello bow is about 80 on up, and often cellists in the U.S. tend to like them over 80; 82 or 83 is a really common weight for a cello bow," Rose notes.
Another characteristic has to do with the way the bow digs into the strings. You want a bow that will dig in without the wood hitting the string. If you're digging, you can get that nice accented sound. But if the bow isn't strong enough, the stick will flex so much that the hair is caught between the string and the bow and you don't have as much control over it, Rose notes.

Elasticity is another important characteristic, but it's a tougher concept to understand. A musician might describe a bow lacking elasticity as "sluggish" or unresponsive. The quality of the wood determines its elasticity.

Rose remembers when she got her first decent cello bow. Looking back now from the vantage point of a bow maker, she is surprised at the quality of wood in that stick. "If you get this kind of pernambuco that's really high quality, you can actually feel the vibrations of the string as they travel all the way down the stick. The difference between brazilwood and pernambuco, and I'm talking a really good piece of brazilwood and a really good piece of pernambuco, is that the brazilwood has the strength and weight, but it doesn't have the elasticity that the pernambuco has."
The characteristic that may be most critical is the balance. A lot of bows that are $750 or under lack balance and tend to be rather tip-heavy, Rose says. A player counteracting that gets tired sooner.

She advises paying attention to the aesthetics of the bow as well--the workmanship, the camber of the stick. And, naturally, condition is important when shopping for bows, especially if you are choosing an old one. A bow that has been broken at the head and repaired is never a good buy because it may come apart again. A repair at the frog is less important, though you shouldn't pay too high a price for such a bow. As when buying your instrument, you'll want to make sure you purchase your bow from a shop that will maintain it after the sale. It's not unusual for bows to warp, for example, but that's an easy problem for a good maker to fix. And you'll want to know the shop's trade-in policy, for the day you decide to move up to a bow of yet higher quality.

Because it can be so overwhelming to shop for bows, Rose suggests making a checklist (it's a trick that helps when you're shopping for an instrument, too). Write the bows down on one side and make columns across the top with characteristics: strength, balance, how well it plays staccato and spiccato.

When you're trying out bows, you want to try doing really long detache bows. Just play some long scales to see how even it feels. Then you want to try doing spiccato passages. Do some martele. Then you want to play some pieces to see how comfortable it feels in your hand. You want to try playing softly and loudly, she advises.

Givens has a two-step process for helping players choose bows. The first is judging for sound; the second is for response. "Take four bows, play one against the other, and just think about the sound. Play something easy for your left hand so that your full concentration is on the sound," Givens says. "Try not to think too much about how the bow is handling at the point. Just play a G-major scale. And just play one bow, then play the next bow. Go back and forth between those two until you know which one you like the sound of better. And go on to the third one. Two notes to a bow or more, just focusing on the sound.

Try to narrow down all the choices to two or three bows and then test those for the way they respond. So then play your pieces that really necessitate different bow strokes. Playing loud, playing soft, playing at the tip, playing at the frog, playing short notes, and playing long notes.

Zabinski has a few "don'ts" for players shopping for their first good bow. For one, don't pay too much attention to how quickly it dances off the strings; the very greatest bows have rather soft spiccatos. "It's a bad test," he says. "That's on the bottom of the list. Yes, you do have to be able to get off the string, but when you're making music almost all of the music is melody, where you want long, drawn bows and you're just simply making sound. These fancy, splashy things are a very small part of music making and really aren't a particularly accurate measure of quality of the bow."

As for the bow's sound, he advises asking your teacher and others who are musically close to you to listen as you play the bow. Even parents who insist that they don't know anything about music often come up with astute observations about the sound of one bow versus another when they listen to their child play. The key, of course,is that you must be the one playing; the bow will sound completely different in someone else's hands.

Finally, avoid glitzy-looking bows. You pay a lot for glitz and may not get much substance, he says. Simply buy the highest quality of bow you can buy. "It's the bow that will really assist or hinder a student's development, much more than the instrument itself. It's much more important to buy as much of a bow as you can. In fact, oftentimes one can significantly upgrade one's sound and ability to play just by buying a better bow," Zabinski says. It's breathtaking what a bow can do."

--Susan M. Barbieri