How important is this violin bow trait?

[GMM22]

Everybody knows the standard things that purportedly good bow possess, such as optimum balance point, weight, tone, etc., but one characteristic not often discussed in detail is "bow tracking". I understand this to be the ability of a bow to oscillate up and down very little as the bow is smoothly drawn with some applied pressure. Bows that do not track well are often described as skitterish or nervous.

My questions are many. Are there such things as very good bows in all manners except that they do not track well? Can a bow track very well and yet be undistinguished in all other regard? How important is the quality of tracking overall when considering fine bow selection? What kind of tracking qualities do the very best old French bows generally have? Any theories on what makes a bow track well? Is tracking closely connected to some other characteristic, in other words, is it usually found that bows that track well also have characteristic x?

[GMM22]

I can hardly believe that no one has any insight into this bow characteristic. Surely someone has examined this particular phenomenon critically enough to render an opinion or a few personal observations of some sort.

[Andrew Victor]

It sounds to me as though you are trying to generalize the behavior of a specific bow you have experience of.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Something as simple as too much weight (winding) near the frog of a bow can cause tracking problems. It is not that uncommon to find older bows that have this kind of problem because of prior mistreatment by incompetent technicians. It is not difficult to cure this particular problem.

Over-hairing (especially) but under-hairing as well can totally hange the behavior of a bow.

Differences in stiffness of sticks must be compensated by different camber, different amounts of hair, perhaps adjusting the balance.

If a bow is made by an individual, all of these factors should work together and the price will indicate that level of care.

It is possible to find these fine properties (somehwat fortuitously, I think) in mass-produced bows - but not with the consistency of of individually-made bows.

Much more can be said - but I won't.

Andy

[GMM22]

Hello Andrew,

Thank you for the response. I am not inquiring about a particular bow. Instead, I am trying to gain a deeper general understanding of how tracking relates to good bows. I lack access to any very fine bows for examination, and thus must resort to extrapolating the musings of others who do for deeper insight. To get further along I am first trying to establish just how important tracking is in relation to other criteria.

I do appreciate your comments as they are a start, but there is much more that can be said, as you have also indicated.

[Andrew Victor]

"I am not inquiring about a particular bow. Instead, I am trying to gain a deeper general understanding of how tracking relates to good bows."

That being the case, if a bow will not track without you having to give it a thought, I would say "forget it."

Really fine bows (I think I've played a few) seem to know what you want to do - and do it! It's really quite remarkable and leads to the enthusiasm some of us have. It's almost as though the maker (lower case) was able to enclose this remarkable "spirit" in that stick of wood - to do what it will be called upon to do. Even with such a bow, slight differences - less (or more) than optimum hair spoiling the balance with too much mass at one end or the other, will spoil the performance of a perfect stick.

Andy

[GMM22]

Andy

I must confess, I did not comprehend your statement ("That being the case, if a bow will not track without you having to give it a thought, I would say "forget it.")

However, I am beginning to glean from the rest of your post that tracking itself is important, and good tracking is usually found in good bows.

While I find your reference to hair quantity important, I believe there are other factors at play as well, for even a large difference in hair quantity (say 40 hairs, or about one gram) distributed as equally as it is, will result in only small changes in balance or mass distribution. Changes could also be attributed to differences in internal dampening of energy. More hairs will mean less strain or force applied to each individual strand of hair. Additional hairs would likely dampen longitudinal waves more readily. I am surprised and interested to learn from you that differences in hair quantity may result in specific changes in tracking, even in bows recognized as being exceptional. This is a significant observation, and makes some further way toward my understanding of "bow tracking".

[Andres Sender]

Although thinking in terms of frequency may be barking up the wrong tree, it's not surprising to imagine that a 'thicker' band of hair would impact the bow's behavior simply because the relationship between the stick's tension and the hair's tension will be changed, and one, or the other, or both will do its sympathetic vibrating at a different frequency. This will change how the bow reacts to being used.

I am no expert on bows, but I think of good tracking as being a result of a certain amount of damping in the bow as a whole.

Andy do you find that a bow will track differently on different violins or is it a pretty independent characteristic?

[Craig Tucker]

Ok, I'll give this a shot. I'm not a bow maker, but I do quite a bit of rehairing and repairing.

Bad "tracking" is a trait I usually associate with a bow that has lost or is starting to lose its camber. Or, with a stick that simply isn't stiff enough to begin with...

I'm not sure that it has a lot to do with weight specifically, I've played both light and heavy sticks that don't exhibit undesirable tracking characteristics at all.

For me it is more a stiffness/tension matter - thus, it may well be associated with improper amount of hair for the bow (or not) depending on the bow itself.

Helpful, huh?

An interesting experiment for you, and one that may well help you nail down some of the characteristics of poor tracking, might be to obtain a cheap bow that has lost most of its camber and tighten it up so that the stick has a large gap between itself and the hair, or even one that opens up all the way and bends in the opposite direction than the camber is supposed to go in order to obtain playing tension, and play it for a while.

(If you don't posses such a stick, let me know...)

Such a stick will exhibit a great amount of the exact bad tracking traits that you are talking about above, and will tend to bounce and tremble its way along.

I will add here that Andy is absolutely right about too much hair making a stick play just plain bad. As a rehairer, I have run into this phenomenon before, and before I got a lot of experience with bows - I used to listen to the school teachers and parents who always wanted as much hair stuffed into the stick as it would hold... after a short while (two or three years) of attempting to comply with requests like this, I now try to educate anyone who requests "extra hair" about the fact that their bow will only accept and play well with a certain amount of hair.

I'm convinced that most sticks play much much better with less hair than more hair - relative to the amount of hair the mortice will comfortably hold.

Many customers are looking for "extra hair" to be put into their bows because they think the bow will last longer between rehairs, or that they are getting more value for their money, but, it has been my experience after rehairing five or six hundred bows, that in fact it takes a really small amount of hair over what is "optimum" for the bow to start deadening up.

What happens is that it starts to lose responsiveness and becomes cumbersome and dead - both sounding and feeling.

To me now such bows just feel like too much hair is in them, but there were many years when I really couldn't tell what was wrong with the bow other than the fact that it just didn't impress me for some reason.

One time here I heard Michael D suggest a great experiment for a bow that you think may have too much hair - play it and slowly cut some of the excess hair off and continue to play the bow and see how the response changes.

Good luck with this GM.

[Violinflu]

GMM22, allow me to take a stab at your original question...

I recently completed a 2+ year search for a new bow, precisely because me old bow had undesirable tracking characteristics - too much bouncing and shivering to control without excess pressure. It was preventing me from playing comfortably at the frog and simply took away from my confidence in the stick.

I was very surprised when some of the first bows I tried, much cheaper than the bow I was replacing, exhibited far better "tracking" - smooth and strait the whole way, with not a single wobble. Unfortunately, they also had uninspiring sound, feel, and action. In discussions with dealers and teachers, I learned that the "quivering" of bows was as much an indication of quality as a defect. All of the finest French bows I tried (many costing more than new BMWs) exhibited some degree of quiver. The difference between them and my old bow, however, was obvious. It is a question of degree. A bow without any quiver feels dead in the hand and sounds lifeless, particularly in off-the-string bow strokes. A perfect bow (IMHO) is just live enough to transmit the vibrations from the strings through the stick into the fingers, which helps the violinist's feel, touch, and subtlety.

The bow I settled on (English, and therefore still just barely in my price range) made me smile after one stroke - I was tuning the A and D, and after one whole-bow downbow, I grinned, took the bow off the strings, and put it aside, saving it for last. A great bow does that - it grabs you. In my case, it was the wonderful way the bow kept a firm contact at a desirable sounding point, while simultaneously letting me know through the stick that there was life and action just waiting to be called upon.

To consisely answer your questions:

Are there such things as very good bows in all manners except that they do not track well? Yes, my old bow is one example.

Can a bow track very well and yet be undistinguished in all other regard? Yes, there are many bows that fall into this category, some very cheaply.

How important is the quality of tracking overall when considering fine bow selection? Incredibly important, at least for me. On the same level of importance as sound production.

What kind of tracking qualities do the very best old French bows generally have? They generally track exceptionally well, but in a lively way... This is almost impossible to describe. I would suggest you try to get your hands on a Simon, a Pajeot, a Maline, or a Tourte (or better, all four!) to feel this.

Hope this helped,

Jesse

[DougP]

Bows have a specific tension at which they work best. If the bow has too much hair, it takes a lot more tension to pull the hair bundle tight and screws up the delicate balance between the hair and stick. If the hair is too tight, it does not "wrap" over the string but slides right on top of it. Makes for some neat sounding screeches and raspy noises.

[GMM22]

Thanks for all the responses. The consensus seems to be that hair quantity can significantly affect tracking quality, as well as other factors such as good camber to facilitate high hair strain.

Jesse, your response was extremely helpful and precisely what I needed to know. Sometimes one needs specific answers in a very primitive or mundane way that does not always appear logical to a casual observer. That was the case here as the specific answers merely help me to better conceptualize the relative importance of tracking as a particular bow phenomenon.

[Andres Sender]

FWIW 'good' camber is not just about tension, it's about how the tension is distributed in the stick, and in some weird way which I don't grasp yet, how it feels to be distributed in the hair.

[Regis]

Quote:

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FWIW 'good' camber is not just about tension, it's about how the tension is distributed in the stick, and in some weird way which I don't grasp yet, how it feels to be distributed in the hair.

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Interesting. Would you be so kind as to expound on this?

Thank you,

Regis

[Craig Tucker]

Hmmm, If I may...

I have to agree with Andres here. It seems fairly self evident. Good camber IS about how the tension is distributed in the stick.

Since the word "camber" is merely referring to the fact that a bend has been imparted to the stick, and doesn't necessarily imply where or take into account the thickness of the wood or other considerations, then, it only stands to reason that the playing qualities of the stick itself will vary depending on where the bend is and how it is shaped, in relation to the length or thickness of the stick.

Do we agree on this statement?

The location and characteristics of the bend combined with the varying thicknesses possible, would HAVE to be a key feature regarding what gives the sticks their various differing (posiitive or negative) playing traits.

I'm not sure what the specifics are either, because again - I'm not a bow maker, but I can see and feel the different qualities that different bows posess just by looking at them and playing them.

Every stick has slightly different qualities depending on where the bend is along the length of the stick, how thick the stick is, its taper, and how much innate stiffness the wood has to begin with. Some sticks are flabby and some are almost unbelieveably stiff.

Another odd observation I've made regarding bows in general is that, due to the nature of materials, even Glasser brand fiberglass bows can vary tremendously in their playing quality from bow to bow.

[Regis]

CY,

Yes we agree on that statement. In restoring, I 'try' to make the bend inversely proportional to the stiffness(usually thickness). I don't understand how that is "distributed in the hair" (in Andres response above). Does that mean that there is different tensions along the length of the hair? Is there some relationship between hair tension and where/how much bend occurrs?

Regis

[Craig Tucker]

Oh, I see what you're getting at. Good point. I believe I misunderstood the thrust of your question then.

I'll let Anders answer this himself because I don't know EXACTLY what he was referring to either, but I would venture to guess that since the only part of the bow that touches the violin is the hair, then, different bows with an equal amount of tension in the hair will still play differently since it isn't ONLY the hair tension that determines playing quality.

In such a senario it would stand to reason that it is the way in which the tension is imparted to the hair, that determines the quality of the bow and not just the amount of tension?

All of which factors determine the playing character of the bow.

Anders?

[Craig Tucker]

Is there some relationship between hair tension and where/how much bend occurrs?

Yes, but in my opinion the idea is that the same tension could be obtained by putting the bend in any one of a number of places - but the playing quality will be altered radically if the bend isn't in some position that is optimum.

[fiddlecollector]

One other detail i think is an important trait amongst certain French makers is the cross section of the stick. Often not round, but oval shaped.

[Andres Sender]

I wish I had more to say about this issue of apparent variations in tension in the hair--it's something some players talk about, it makes no sense to me intuitively but it comes up too often to dismiss.

One way it comes up is in terms of 'best bounce' or 'sweet spots' in the hair, which can be changed through changing the camber, indicating that this is not just an issue of a linear strengthening/weakening while the pattern of felt tension in the hair remains the same.

Andrew Victor would be able to clear this up I imagine.

Camber is often applied not just based on stick graduations but also on how the bow appears to bend. I know some people approach it with the idea of looking for a kind of 'wave' effect starting at the tip as the bow bends. This makes sense to me in terms of encouraging damping in the bow, but I can't say how that idea relates to fine bows, since I haven't any experience with those.

[GMM22]

I must confess that I might not frequent forums often enough as I do not know what FWIW stands for (Andres). However, I am curious.

Although these threads do tend to diverge and take on their own direction with regard to content, it is worth noting that the main issue was specifically how tracking as a phenomenon in and of itself is manifest in very fine playing bows.

It was not clear to me what kind or degree of tracking is found in fine bows, or even how important it is. Jesse indicated that it is a question of degree, and that even the very finest bows exhibit some slight movement in tracking. I would be curious to know if anyone differs from his opinion.

I have since performed an experiment as previously mentioned with a certain bow that was not tracking well, while noting specific changes. The bow, which is fairly light to begin with, had been haired with 161 strands. After paring it down to 145 in 4 strand groups, I can say that the results were quite dramatic. The tracking improved significantly, and to a greater extent than I might have imagined after trimming only 10% of the strands.

I am a bit lost on what is being discussed about tension in the hair. Laws of physics dictate that the actual tension must be the same at any arbitrary point of the hair ribbon, though the apparent tension (what we might perceive incorrectly) could change from point to point. If a bow were to appear perfectly cambered, but in fact had a weak spot in the wood at say 5 inches from the grip, hard playing would cause one to perceive lower hair tension near that point since the wood will yield readily at that spot.

[Regis]

FWIW = for what it's worth

[Andrew Victor]

I did a lot of "tests" of stick stiffness, counting hairs (and trimming some off and having other bows rehaired), assessing sound quality, etc. I even tried to start getting into some dynamic properties but had no feasible measurement tools.

What I did find regarding sound quality was that it seemed to be best if the hair was stretched a certain amount (about 0.4 mm). This requires a certain force (tension) on each hair and this force is imparted by "tightening the hair" and the consequent added bending of the bow stick. (Realize that the actual hairs in a bow generally vary wuite a bit in diameter and thus in their stretching under a given tension, so my 0.4 mm is sort of an average.)

The more hairs you have. the more the bow will have to be tightened ot tighten them each just so much.

The stiffer the stick the less the angle of turning to impart a certain stretch to the hairs.

Both the hair and the stick will further distort as you play with a certain force (constant or transient) on the string. For stiffer bow sticks, more of this additional distortion is taken up by the hair.

A "soft" stick can be made to feel and perform more like a stiffer one by reducing the amount of hair.

Alhough tightening or loosening hair can change the way a bow makes an instrument sound, there is an optimum distortion under tension for each stick. If the bow has to be tightened differently than this amount co compensate for too much or too little hair, the player will not have this design feature to assist in playing.

These are just some of the things I learned in fooling around with bows, rulers, and mass scales ("balances". There was lots more to learn, but after 9/11 I just could not get my heart back into using bows for anything but playing.

Andy

See more at: http://members.aol.com/bowedstrings/bows-magic-wands.html

[GMM22]

Hello Victor,

I had discovered your bow pages some time ago through a Google search, but I did not correlate them to your Maestronet postings until you included the link. The written information you present there is very interesting, and of much value. I am also quite curious about your bow calculator, and I have looked at it somewhat, but I must admit that a number of columns such as I L M N and O, are not defined well enough to allow a casual observer full comprehension. It is hard to tell what exact procedures you have used to arrive at the data, or what the data represents. Although, one does sense that the undefined information is very relevant. You probably have little intention to modify or add to the calculator, but it is a bit of a shame that your significant efforts are only partially decipherable.

In any event, the information you present there is appreciated

[Craig Tucker]

"I am a bit lost on what is being discussed about tension in the hair. Laws of physics dictate that the actual tension must be the same at any arbitrary point of the hair ribbon, though the apparent tension (what we might perceive incorrectly) could change from point to point. If a bow were to appear perfectly cambered, but in fact had a weak spot in the wood at say 5 inches from the grip, hard playing would cause one to perceive lower hair tension near that point since the wood will yield readily at that spot."

I don't agree.

While the above may be true about a bow that is tensioned up to playing pitch and left alone in space, for a bow that is being played additional tension will be levered on to the bow (for example) from the frog end against the strings, and the playing pressure will vary depending on how close or far away from the frog you are playing. Consider that at the same time the hair will be deflected by varying amounts depending on a number of factors during the act of playing also. It follows that the "tension" will also vary accordingly due to MANY factors.

The hair on an unplayed bow does have a "static tension" by itself due simply to tightening the bow screw, but during play, the stick will bend (even if only slightly) according to the pressure exerted upon it, and the hair itself will be pressed in and out of "flat" - both factors causing the tension to vary continually.

This is not a static system but a dynamic one. Virtually all of the qualities you are looking at (including tracking) will have something to do with the dynamic qualities of the bow (playing qualities or those qualities that ONLY exhibit themselves during play - how well does an unplayed bow track anyway?) and not the static qualities (those qualities the bow has when not being played.) or perhaps it would be fair to say that both the static and dynamic qualities must be addressed.

Can you describe an active bow using as an example a perfect theoretical bow that is in a static state as this statement seems to imply?

"Laws of physics dictate that the actual tension must be the same at any arbitrary point of the hair ribbon, though the apparent tension (what we might perceive incorrectly) could change from point to point."

This is the same type of mistake in thinking that many scientifically minded people make when assesing the actions of the violin also.

You know, as I read this post over. I fear that I may come off as overbearing or borderline insulting. One poster here has recently PM'd me that this is definately the case. That isn't my intention. I am genuinely interested in these things. Bows, and what makes them tick, continually fascinate me.

[GMM22]

Curiously I do not know what PM'd means either! In any event, I am hardly insulted as you are obviously correct about the tension changing. True to my statement that I was not exactly following what was being said, I was only considering the static bow, which must have the same hair tension at any arbitrary point.

Your observations triggered much enlightenment in considering the tension variations depending on dynamics of the music being played.

Assessing the actions of a violin bow scientifically is only a "mistake in thinking" if the conclusions do not later yield improvements in understanding or manufacture. Certainly one could become lost in a morass of minutiae, but the fine art is cultivating information that is relevant, and using it effectively. Thanks for the interesting reply.