I've been playing fiddle for a while, but I'm still having trouble keeping my bowing straight. I'm wondering how other players have learned this. Is it visual, or a certain feel in the bowing arm? Or do you aim for a certain sound in your tone and then know you've gotten it right?
Thanks for any tips! Zhenya
How about all of the above? After a while, it just stays in the groove and I don't ever think about it much. When I do check it, my bow is where it should be. I think it got there by doing everything you suggest--watching it in a mirror (visual), burning in that muscle sense of where my arm and hand needed to be, and listening to the results--the tone. It seems like tone is what I monitor now, but only with the subconscious part of my brain (the bigger half! hah).
I might also suggest that you focus on keeping your upper arm (above the elbow) pretty much in the same place. It lifts and lowers when you go from one string to the next, but your upper arm shouldn't swing forward or backward at all. You can test this by standing next to a wall with the back of your bowing arm flush against the wall. Play some long bows on one string--the back of your upper arm should stay lightly in contact with the wall, not pull away or press into it. Now change strings, aiming for that same light contact. Remember what that feels like and step away from the wall while bowing.
Hope this helps. Controlling your bow is crucial to getting a good tone. You'll gain a lot by focusing on it, and it's good that you're aware of the difficulty you're having--that's half the battle of correcting it.
Leave it to me to forget the most important part! Yes, of course, relax. Aim to make it effortless...which naturally will be a straight line. I find that easier to achieve (if "effortlessness" is something that you *can* "achieve") when bowing on the e string because your upper arm is at its most relaxed (elbow low and at your side) and your forearm just allows gravity to do its work straight up and down.
Just out of curiosity, when you say you've been fiddling "for a while," how long is that? In my experience, as a player and teacher, smooth, accurate bowing takes thousands of hours to develop. It can be "adequate" soon enough, but don't expect to really get it swinging overnight. Of course, the higher your expectations are, the better you will become (as long as you set more immediately reachable short-term goals to get you there without becoming too discouraged ).
Bowing is difficult, except that once it's in you, it's remarkably easy. "Effortless." Oh, and have fun. Enjoy it. Take time to appreciate what you do well and the improvements you've made.
First time poster - out of lurkdom. One of my fiddling friends videotaped me from a very telling angle. I watched the playback and learned a lot about how straight I was bowing (not!). He later set up a live TV shot from the video cam which helps once you get the hang of it. At first, its like trying to cut your hair in a mirror. You move left, it moves right, etc.
Well, welcome to the outside, Carrmuse. You wouldn't live in Ft. Collins, Colorado, now would you?
Wheeeeeooooooo -- we're supposed to get 16 inches of snow tonight. That'd be fun. I might even get some actual practising in if it does. Bad when you can't get your priorities arranged the way you'd rather....
Great tips and advice, here's a little something we use to do with very young children so they could get the "feel" of the whole bowing action.
To isolate that action we would have them practice bowing without a violin - by using an empty paper towel cylinder just a few minutes before doing the open string long bowing. Hold the cylinder in left hand, on left shoulder, use a mirror to keep the bowing angle - bow up and down through the cylinder, it doesn't allow you to bow forward and back, ride the stick of the bow on the inside top of the cylinder so you won't damage the horsehair. You can rotate the angles from E back to G - KInd of like golfers and baseball hitters practice their swings in isolation before they step up and connect.
I remember my first violin year ( I was 7) and dad told me to practice each day straight bowing in front of the big wardrobe mirror for almost endless long minutes..... it was boring and awful, but it helped.... (more or less ... I quit playing violin with 13 - but when I recovered my fiddle and started learning ITM four years ago I still had a straight bowing
Bow Wings are available for the most serious problems. This unit attaches to the fiddle with rubber bands
and provides a track or "canyon" for the bow to travel in. I had a blind beginning fiddle student several
years ago who used this device until she got the right feel. Thanks for the welcome Zina -
I'm from West Texas.
Leave it to folks in Texas to come up with another kind of barbeque wings...sounds like a good use for all those noisy fiddle bows out there. But if they're like mine, they sure don't have much meat on 'em.....(I'm KIDDING!).
Zhenya, I have no real advice, just thought I'd pitch in my experience. There's a sweet, sweet tone my fiddle is capable of producing, and if I hear it, I know I'm not only bowing straight, but in exactly the right spot (on my fiddle, about half an inch below the bottom of the fretboard but it varies from string to string.)
There's two schools of thought on learning every technique: The tools, tricks, and training school which has blessed us with such things as metronomes, drills and "bow wings". Good technique is won by long, hard frustrating hours of specific focus.
Then there's the "osmosis" school where you (as a friend of mine put it last night) "live and breathe it". Things can be slowed down and analyzed, but mostly your skills develop through constant playing, and constant watching and listening. Good technique isn't battled for and won, but just kind of sneaks up on you. One day your fiddle just offers you a perfect roll or triplet and you are pleasantly surprised because you don't remember ever having produced one before.
I prefer the latter method. The playing (practicing) is what makes it all come together in the end either way, and I'd rather play lovingly and thoughlessly than purposefully and repetitively.
By the way, as I am learning, in the osmosis school one must play slow. As slow as one possibly can, then even slower. If they sound good slow, then you're a genius. Better than me anyway.
Thanks for the help! In answer to your question, Will, I played for about a year with a teacher, then about 5 years without one (during which I learned mostly repertoire, and was very lazy about working on any technique) and now about 6 months with another teacher. I’ve liked both the teachers and don’t blame them for my lack of progress in the area of straight bowing. The first one did go over this with me, but at the beginning there were so many other things to focus on that I never quite got it. I have started working on it again now with my current teacher.
I’ve heard some of the general ideas posted here (but not all! --- the one about the paper towel cylinder is definitely new to me! But I’m glad to try anything that will help.) But what I like, and one reason I posted the question, is getting the individual nuances that help me put these ideas into practice. Getting another angle on things always helps. (Whoops, no pun intended!) I also wondered if there was one particular approach that the most people found helpful. But I guess it’s really a combination of all the things people have mentioned. (I actually have a set of those bow wings, but found them a little difficult to use as they kept moving around on the fiddle. But I may dig them out of the drawer and try again. Thanks for the motivation!)
I find I can bow straight if that’s the main thing I’m focusing on. But it hasn’t become automatic yet, so when I’m also trying to focus on the other 11 or so simultaneous aspects of playing the fiddle, I often find the bow going astray. This is fact is, to me, the second hardest thing about playing the fiddle – keeping everything coordinated.
And the hardest? Just what Zina and Will mentioned here – staying relaxed! At one lesson a few months ago, I was focusing really hard and thought I had everything coordinated just so. Then, somewhere in the background, I heard my teacher say, in all seriousness, “Don’t stop breathing!” So I’ve thought about that ever since, but sometimes I have to remind myself to relax both body and mind. I also think of fiddlers (and other musicians) I’ve seen who look the most relaxed and try to get that feeling. (One who comes to mind is Bruce Molsky.)
So thanks, everyone, for your comments and I’ve printed them out to really work on. Here’s to straight bowing!
I just went to post this and saw the last comment from fiddler on vermouth. I think my own approach is to have a combination of technique and osmosis, but I think the osmosis part is, overall, the one that turns you into a real fiddler.
I agree on the osmosis method. What really matters when you're playing an instrument is the quality of the sound you produce--its tone, range, intonation, rhythm, etc. So that should be your most important feedback loop--listen to the sounds you make, and try to reproduce the ones you most like.
Relaxing is one of those things that you can only reach by not reaching for it. What helped me early on was to notice how it felt to be totally relaxed when I *wasn't* playing fiddle--like when you're on the verge of falling asleep, or floating in water, or vegging on the couch. Then I'd recreate that feeling--loose muscles, nothing gripping or tightening, etc.--as I started in to a tune. If you have to, break it down by body part--bowing arm, bowing hand, fingering arm, fingering hand, neck, back, breathing muscles, feet, etc.
The other thing that helps me is to mentally focus completely on the tune--on the flow of notes in my head. When I'm in the zone like that, everything else just happens on auto pilot and I'm at my most relaxed.
As Kevin Burke says, physically relaxed, mentally ferocious.
I think relaxing is definitely the most important of all of these. I forget who we were talking to on what thread, but we likened it to when you're doing something automatically without thinking a thing about it, like when you drive a car. You don't tense up every time you go to turn on the turn signal, right?
If you're relaxed, you can have the most terrible bowing form ever, and so long as the tone is good, who cares? (Well, besides your teacher, who you pay to care about things like that. ) Some of the best Irish players have the worst bowing technique I've ever seen, but the sound they produce is wonderful anyway. So, at least in terms of ITM, I wouldn't worry overly much about it.
By the way, I just noticed this when I was *trying* to focus on straight bowing, just out of curiosity. I did a terrible job of it as soon as I started thinking of it, but I did notice if the bow sneaks away up the neck, it means I'm holding the bow too close to my body. If it slips up toward the bridge, my bowing hand is too far away.
This is useful to know, because sometimes at a session I'll close my eyes and slip away somewhere as I'm playing and then when I open them a few tunes later, my bow isn't where I left it. It's an inch closer to the bridge. Now I realize this means I have a habit of holding my bowing arm a bit too far out. Now that it's in my brain, though, I'm not going to think about it any more.
As Will said, it's most helpful to focus solely on the quality of the notes coming out of your instrument and allow them to match the notes in your head. Personally, I don't feel like I'm training myself to wring music out of my fiddle, I feel like I'm just slowly removing the obstacle of my personal inadequacy so my instrument can sing on its own.
Developing straight bowing - any advice?
Developing straight bowing - any advice?
I've been playing fiddle for a while, but I'm still having trouble keeping my bowing straight. I'm wondering how other players have learned this. Is it visual, or a certain feel in the bowing arm? Or do you aim for a certain sound in your tone and then know you've gotten it right?
Thanks for any tips! Zhenya
# Posted on February 28th 2002 by Zhenya
Re: Developing straight bowing - any advice?
For me it started visual and then eventually became second nature.
# Posted on February 28th 2002 by flyinfiddler
Re: Developing straight bowing - any advice?
How about all of the above? After a while, it just stays in the groove and I don't ever think about it much. When I do check it, my bow is where it should be. I think it got there by doing everything you suggest--watching it in a mirror (visual), burning in that muscle sense of where my arm and hand needed to be, and listening to the results--the tone. It seems like tone is what I monitor now, but only with the subconscious part of my brain (the bigger half! hah).
I might also suggest that you focus on keeping your upper arm (above the elbow) pretty much in the same place. It lifts and lowers when you go from one string to the next, but your upper arm shouldn't swing forward or backward at all. You can test this by standing next to a wall with the back of your bowing arm flush against the wall. Play some long bows on one string--the back of your upper arm should stay lightly in contact with the wall, not pull away or press into it. Now change strings, aiming for that same light contact. Remember what that feels like and step away from the wall while bowing.
Hope this helps. Controlling your bow is crucial to getting a good tone. You'll gain a lot by focusing on it, and it's good that you're aware of the difficulty you're having--that's half the battle of correcting it.
# Posted on February 28th 2002 by Will Harmon
Re: Developing straight bowing - any advice?
Oh, and while you're doing all that, Zhenya, keep your bowing arm relaxed as well. *grin* Honest, it'll come if you keep working at it.
Zina
# Posted on February 28th 2002 by Zina Lee
Re: Developing straight bowing - any advice?
Leave it to me to forget the most important part! Yes, of course, relax. Aim to make it effortless...which naturally will be a straight line. I find that easier to achieve (if "effortlessness" is something that you *can* "achieve") when bowing on the e string because your upper arm is at its most relaxed (elbow low and at your side) and your forearm just allows gravity to do its work straight up and down.
Just out of curiosity, when you say you've been fiddling "for a while," how long is that? In my experience, as a player and teacher, smooth, accurate bowing takes thousands of hours to develop. It can be "adequate" soon enough, but don't expect to really get it swinging overnight. Of course, the higher your expectations are, the better you will become (as long as you set more immediately reachable short-term goals to get you there without becoming too discouraged ).
Bowing is difficult, except that once it's in you, it's remarkably easy. "Effortless." Oh, and have fun. Enjoy it. Take time to appreciate what you do well and the improvements you've made.
# Posted on February 28th 2002 by Will Harmon
Re: Developing straight bowing - any advice?
First time poster - out of lurkdom. One of my fiddling friends videotaped me from a very telling angle. I watched the playback and learned a lot about how straight I was bowing (not!). He later set up a live TV shot from the video cam which helps once you get the hang of it. At first, its like trying to cut your hair in a mirror. You move left, it moves right, etc.
# Posted on February 28th 2002 by Carrmuse
Re: Developing straight bowing - any advice?
Well, welcome to the outside, Carrmuse.
You wouldn't live in Ft. Collins, Colorado, now would you?
Wheeeeeooooooo -- we're supposed to get 16 inches of snow tonight. That'd be fun. I might even get some actual practising in if it does. Bad when you can't get your priorities arranged the way you'd rather....
Zina
# Posted on February 28th 2002 by Zina Lee
Re: Developing straight bowing - any advice?
Great tips and advice, here's a little something we use to do with very young children so they could get the "feel" of the whole bowing action.
To isolate that action we would have them practice bowing without a violin - by using an empty paper towel cylinder just a few minutes before doing the open string long bowing. Hold the cylinder in left hand, on left shoulder, use a mirror to keep the bowing angle - bow up and down through the cylinder, it doesn't allow you to bow forward and back, ride the stick of the bow on the inside top of the cylinder so you won't damage the horsehair. You can rotate the angles from E back to G - KInd of like golfers and baseball hitters practice their swings in isolation before they step up and connect.
# Posted on February 28th 2002 by Carl Conn
Re: Developing straight bowing - any advice?
I remember my first violin year ( I was 7) and dad told me to practice each day straight bowing in front of the big wardrobe mirror for almost endless long minutes..... it was boring and awful, but it helped.... (more or less ... I quit playing violin with 13 - but when I recovered my fiddle and started learning ITM four years ago I still had a straight bowing
# Posted on February 28th 2002 by crannog
Re: Developing straight bowing - any advice?
Bow Wings are available for the most serious problems. This unit attaches to the fiddle with rubber bands
and provides a track or "canyon" for the bow to travel in. I had a blind beginning fiddle student several
years ago who used this device until she got the right feel. Thanks for the welcome Zina -
I'm from West Texas.
Joe
# Posted on March 1st 2002 by Carrmuse
Re: Developing straight bowing - any advice?
Leave it to folks in Texas to come up with another kind of barbeque wings...sounds like a good use for all those noisy fiddle bows out there. But if they're like mine, they sure don't have much meat on 'em.....(I'm KIDDING!).
# Posted on March 1st 2002 by Will Harmon
Re: Developing straight bowing - any advice?
Zhenya, I have no real advice, just thought I'd pitch in my experience. There's a sweet, sweet tone my fiddle is capable of producing, and if I hear it, I know I'm not only bowing straight, but in exactly the right spot (on my fiddle, about half an inch below the bottom of the fretboard but it varies from string to string.)
There's two schools of thought on learning every technique: The tools, tricks, and training school which has blessed us with such things as metronomes, drills and "bow wings". Good technique is won by long, hard frustrating hours of specific focus.
Then there's the "osmosis" school where you (as a friend of mine put it last night) "live and breathe it". Things can be slowed down and analyzed, but mostly your skills develop through constant playing, and constant watching and listening. Good technique isn't battled for and won, but just kind of sneaks up on you. One day your fiddle just offers you a perfect roll or triplet and you are pleasantly surprised because you don't remember ever having produced one before.
I prefer the latter method. The playing (practicing) is what makes it all come together in the end either way, and I'd rather play lovingly and thoughlessly than purposefully and repetitively.
# Posted on March 1st 2002 by Kerri Brown
By the way, as I am learning, in the osmosis school one must play slow. As slow as one possibly can, then even slower. If they sound good slow, then you're a genius. Better than me anyway.
# Posted on March 1st 2002 by Kerri Brown
Re: Developing straight bowing - any advice?
Thanks for the help! In answer to your question, Will, I played for about a year with a teacher, then about 5 years without one (during which I learned mostly repertoire, and was very lazy about working on any technique) and now about 6 months with another teacher. I’ve liked both the teachers and don’t blame them for my lack of progress in the area of straight bowing. The first one did go over this with me, but at the beginning there were so many other things to focus on that I never quite got it. I have started working on it again now with my current teacher.
I’ve heard some of the general ideas posted here (but not all! --- the one about the paper towel cylinder is definitely new to me! But I’m glad to try anything that will help.) But what I like, and one reason I posted the question, is getting the individual nuances that help me put these ideas into practice. Getting another angle on things always helps. (Whoops, no pun intended!) I also wondered if there was one particular approach that the most people found helpful. But I guess it’s really a combination of all the things people have mentioned. (I actually have a set of those bow wings, but found them a little difficult to use as they kept moving around on the fiddle. But I may dig them out of the drawer and try again. Thanks for the motivation!)
I find I can bow straight if that’s the main thing I’m focusing on. But it hasn’t become automatic yet, so when I’m also trying to focus on the other 11 or so simultaneous aspects of playing the fiddle, I often find the bow going astray. This is fact is, to me, the second hardest thing about playing the fiddle – keeping everything coordinated.
And the hardest? Just what Zina and Will mentioned here – staying relaxed! At one lesson a few months ago, I was focusing really hard and thought I had everything coordinated just so. Then, somewhere in the background, I heard my teacher say, in all seriousness, “Don’t stop breathing!” So I’ve thought about that ever since, but sometimes I have to remind myself to relax both body and mind. I also think of fiddlers (and other musicians) I’ve seen who look the most relaxed and try to get that feeling. (One who comes to mind is Bruce Molsky.)
So thanks, everyone, for your comments and I’ve printed them out to really work on. Here’s to straight bowing!
I just went to post this and saw the last comment from fiddler on vermouth. I think my own approach is to have a combination of technique and osmosis, but I think the osmosis part is, overall, the one that turns you into a real fiddler.
# Posted on March 1st 2002 by Zhenya
Re: Developing straight bowing - any advice?
I agree on the osmosis method. What really matters when you're playing an instrument is the quality of the sound you produce--its tone, range, intonation, rhythm, etc. So that should be your most important feedback loop--listen to the sounds you make, and try to reproduce the ones you most like.
Relaxing is one of those things that you can only reach by not reaching for it. What helped me early on was to notice how it felt to be totally relaxed when I *wasn't* playing fiddle--like when you're on the verge of falling asleep, or floating in water, or vegging on the couch. Then I'd recreate that feeling--loose muscles, nothing gripping or tightening, etc.--as I started in to a tune. If you have to, break it down by body part--bowing arm, bowing hand, fingering arm, fingering hand, neck, back, breathing muscles, feet, etc.
The other thing that helps me is to mentally focus completely on the tune--on the flow of notes in my head. When I'm in the zone like that, everything else just happens on auto pilot and I'm at my most relaxed.
As Kevin Burke says, physically relaxed, mentally ferocious.
# Posted on March 1st 2002 by Will Harmon
Re: Developing straight bowing - any advice?
I think relaxing is definitely the most important of all of these. I forget who we were talking to on what thread, but we likened it to when you're doing something automatically without thinking a thing about it, like when you drive a car. You don't tense up every time you go to turn on the turn signal, right?
Some of the best Irish players have the worst bowing technique I've ever seen, but the sound they produce is wonderful anyway. So, at least in terms of ITM, I wouldn't worry overly much about it.
If you're relaxed, you can have the most terrible bowing form ever, and so long as the tone is good, who cares? (Well, besides your teacher, who you pay to care about things like that. )
Zina
# Posted on March 1st 2002 by Zina Lee
Re: Developing straight bowing - any advice?
By the way, I just noticed this when I was *trying* to focus on straight bowing, just out of curiosity. I did a terrible job of it as soon as I started thinking of it, but I did notice if the bow sneaks away up the neck, it means I'm holding the bow too close to my body. If it slips up toward the bridge, my bowing hand is too far away.
This is useful to know, because sometimes at a session I'll close my eyes and slip away somewhere as I'm playing and then when I open them a few tunes later, my bow isn't where I left it. It's an inch closer to the bridge. Now I realize this means I have a habit of holding my bowing arm a bit too far out. Now that it's in my brain, though, I'm not going to think about it any more.
As Will said, it's most helpful to focus solely on the quality of the notes coming out of your instrument and allow them to match the notes in your head. Personally, I don't feel like I'm training myself to wring music out of my fiddle, I feel like I'm just slowly removing the obstacle of my personal inadequacy so my instrument can sing on its own.
# Posted on March 1st 2002 by Kerri Brown