Earlier in the year, I had picked up a handful of cheap Chinese "factory" baroque bows just to see how the quality was faring these days... and to hopefully strike it lucky again with that one in a million accidentally decent bow.

In the end, all of them were serviceable... decent enough as a stand by, or to lend to a student... but nothing was anywhere close to my main bow for late Baroque-era music. Of course, an unfair comparison between a mass produced bow that is about 50 AUD vs a hand-crafted master bow that is several thousand dollars! And it wasn't just in my mind either... my wife did a blind listening to the bows, and the crafted bow was easily recognisable.

The chief problem with all of these factory bows was that there was a certain muddiness or lack of clarity to the sound... sorry, it is hard to describe it better than that. I guess that the best way to try to describe it is similar to a lack of precision to speaking if you have had a shot of anesthetic to the gums or cheek... everything is sort of there, but it is sort of wooly and imprecise in terms of response and diction.

Now, a good chunk of that will be the resonant quality of the wood stick itself, and the way it is carved and shaped... but some of that will due to the over-hairing of bows. This is something of a bugbear with me... too much hair on a bow will deaden the sound... too little runs into other problems though. But these were definitely over-haired... period bows tend to have thinner ribbons of hair compared to modern bows, and these already felt too full...

... and I had had a bit of a go at just ripping out several hairs at a time by hand... but today, I had thought that I probably shouldn't just rip out hairs but actually bother to cut them so that the loss was a bit more even across the ribbon.

Plus... cutting them would mean that I wouldn't be left with untidy bits at the ends!

It might not seem like much, but taking out about ten strands at a time does make a noticable difference... perhaps it really is in my hands, but there is a bit of a return of clarity and response.

... and in the end, I was left with a pretty full bundle of removed hair! So, the bows aren't still quite of the same quality as my best ones... but they are less annoying to play with. They also have different balances, and some sound deeper than others. I will start to learn which will match which violin better over time... but for the moment, they are useful lending bows and emergency spares!

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