Our ensemble has a small stock of Baroque bows that we can loan out to student guest artists and workshop participants. We order a batch of Chinese factory bows... and weed out the terrible ones, and then try to make the remaining ones a little bit better. Of course, they aren't ever going to be as good as a proper handcrafted bow made by a master crafter... but as a first introduction, they are definitely adequate. After all, "modern" Classical bows are weighted quite differently with a different range response compared to earlier bows... and these are closer, even if they aren't always great.

Still... you never know if the lottery will be in your favour, and I have one in my own use that was a cheap replacement for a more expensive bow that I had damaged.

Now, much of the bow will be in the wood and the crafting of that itself... and there isn't going to be much that can be done about that! But these bows are often overhaired with a thick ribbon of horsehair that dulls the sound and can make a bit of a higher pitched hissing sound when drawn over a string. You can see my main violin bow (the darker wood) with a much thinner ribbon of hair than the lighter coloured bow in front...

... and so I start breaking a few hairs at a time... a modern Classical bow has somewhere around 150 hairs, so you don't want to take off too many! Ten hairs is already quite a few compared to the total! I tend to rip off a few, and then play a bit... and then change bows to compare the sounds... and hopefully, it is starting to get a clearer and cleaner tone. Slowly slowly... you can rip out hairs, but you can't put them back... and I have to take care that I'm taking them out roughly evenly over the ribbon, otherwise there will be a misbalanced tension in the bow hairs which will over time warp the bow wood as well.

So, three bows done... and this is the end result. Two out of the three are starting to sound better, and the third... well, it sounds okay, but it has a carbon fibre stick (compared to snakewood for the other two...), and I find that it is quite stiff in response... when I play it, it feels like it has the springiness and give of concrete... and a good deal of energy that I put into the bow just comes straight out back into my hand making it quite difficult to control. I'm not fond of it... but we do have a guest student who really likes that one!

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