A proper violin bow tension is one of the challenges to getting your best sound.
Looseness or tightness of the bow hair can impact how you sound and how easy it is to play and practice.
You’ll learn how to tighten and loosen the bow and why it’s crucial for keeping it in its best condition.
The most critical aspect of bow care is ensuring you know how to tension your bow when ready to play and loosen your bow after practice.
We can control the violin bow tension with a screw at the end of the bow (it is called the “frog”). Turning the screw right tightens the hair, and turning it left loosens it.
Now it’s time to see how much tension we should put exactly and how to know when tight is too tight.
New students tend to use too much tension on the bow. Remember that your violin bow is fragile. Making your bow too tight can cause many issues:
In other words, avoid tightening so much that the stick goes straight, and prevent it from going convex.
A good recommendation is that a pencil should fit between the bow hair and the stick in the center of the bow.
Turn the adjustment button right to tighten the bow hair. As you keep tightening, the bow hairs will start to distance themselves from the bow’s stick. Tighten until you feel the pencil fit within the space.
This tension will give you the correct amount of control when drawing your bow along the strings.
Remembering to loosen the violin bow tension after every use is most important for the longevity of your bow.
Turn the screw left 2-3 times to loosen bow hair when you don’t play. Make sure that the hair seems slack on the bow. Just don’t loosen your bow a lot because of the risk of the tension screw unthreading and the frog coming off.
By loosening the violin bow tension, you return the bow to its resting position, and the hairs no longer pull it tightly.
You must adjust your violin bow every time you play. The trick with the pencil could take some time, but it gets easier the more you practice.
Soon you’ll be able to determine the excellent violin bow tension without a pencil. The bow hair is closer to the stick at the center of the bow and slightly further from it at the ends.
Your violin bow will perform better, and its hair will last longer when you follow the basic rule: tighten to play, loosen to put away.
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Thank you for reading!