A couple of months ago, I had done a little bit of a gamble on purchasing four really cheap Baroque style bows from a factory in China. The reason for this was that I had gotten lucky at one point in time, and I got a really really good Baroque Viola bow out of a mass produced set of bows. Of course, the rest of the bows were really terrible... but every now and then, if you roll the dice enough times, you just get lucky and a decent bow pops out! And for a sheer miniscule fraction of the price of a proper crafted bow.

I had gotten four bows out of this particular gamble this time around. More of a gamble this time, as I ordered them direct online with no chance to try them. Whereas, the previous time, I had a set of about 20 factory bows to try from... so, stacking the dice on that end of things!

Anyway, it turned out that all four of the cheap factory bows were passable... and two were even a quality that I would consider using them as emergency bows for myself. Still, they were far behind my regular sets of bows that were individually hand-crafted by highly experienced bow makers.... with price tags that sort of reflect that!

The main thing about all the bows... other than having a sometimes sluggish response or differing levels of resonance that affected the way that the violin sounded... was a relative dullness in tone and attack. Well, all these things sort of were feeding into each other in various ways.

A common problem with Baroque bows (and sometimes with the regular modern Classical bows) is that they tend to be over-haired. Actually, this tends to be a more common problem with period instrument bows compared to the modern Classical bows... due to the much thinner ribbon of hair that is required. If the re-hairer has little experience with these specialist bows, they will likely use a full ribbon of hair that is made for the modern bows...

... and having that much hair on a lighter bow tends to make it really dull sounding. It also does the same on a modern Classical bow... but who really notices on those battleaxes?

I had been meaning to thin out the hair ribbons on these cheap bows for a while... but I haven't really had the time. But these couple of weeks, I have a bit of time to kill during the daytime of the concerts. I am just holed up in the hotel doing taxes, accounting, writing, and a little bit of practice... and Balder's Gate 3!

So, I may as well take the time to just thin out the hair. Now, normally I'm going to be a bit more gentle with this thing... I will just take a small scissors or clipper to a few hairs at a time... so that I don't tear out too many in one go, and I keep the carnage sort of evenly spread. However, given that these are cheap bows... I just started ripping out a few hairs and just snapping them.

The main object of the first culling session was to see if thinning out the ribbon would definitely make that much of a difference... or if the wood/construction of the bow was beyond improvement. And it turns out.... yes, the thinning out does help quite a bit! Not enough to make it a master-crafted bow... but definitely improving the sound and response!

I think I will stop on this bow for a bit... but it is likely that I will thin it out even more. Just comparing the hair ribbons on my nice bows versus this one... well, it is still too thick. I'm also a bit dubious about the quality of the hair itself... it seemed to snap a little bit too easily!

Anyway, I will make a start on the rest of the four cheap bows when I get back home... I had left the others behind. I don't have that many bow holders!

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