I’ve done some­thing that I’ve wanted to try for a long time. Tak­ing my Christ­mas gift cer­tifi­cate to Long and McQuade, I bought a vio­lin bow to use on my gui­tar. Let me tell you, it is not easy to just pick up a bow and start play­ing. First thing I noticed was that the notes I was hear­ing were not the notes I was play­ing. That is to say that there must have been some weird har­monic thing going on because, depend­ing on where I stroked the bow on the string, I could make a whole range of pitches occur. I finally found that it sounds best when I bow right over the bridge pickup. I’ll have to inves­ti­gate this fur­ther, but if pressed for a rea­son, I’d say it was because the bow sets up a fixed node and I’m hear­ing arti­fi­cial fun­da­men­tals whose pitch cor­re­sponds to where the bow is on the string and either the fret­ted note or the bridge. This expla­na­tion could be entirely bull­shit, I don’t know. I did try bow­ing open strings over the 12^th fret, which is a fixed node in the string’s vibra­tion. The results of this were unsatisfactory.

It is a good thing I had strung my gui­tar with flat­wounds some time back, as it is much kinder on the bow. Flat or round­wound, either way you end up with a lot of tacky rosin on your strings … and your gui­tar. Be sure to wipe up after you’re done.

As the fret­board on the gui­tar is not arched like stringed instru­ments that are meant to be played with the bow, sin­gle note lines are restricted to the E string (your choice of which). If you want to increase the avail­abil­ity of strings for play­ing sin­gle notes you’ll have to either get a mod­i­fied bridge or a spe­cially made gui­tar. The later you can get from Toga­Man. Cur­rently I’m lik­ing the sounds of the low E and A string draw­ing out long growly power chords, I sup­pose I could open tune the gui­tar to make use of all the strings. I won­der what it would sound like if I did that and used my slide?

I also found I had to wear my gui­tar lower. This made the action of bow­ing eas­ier to do. Hold­ing the bow is a bit odd too. So far the best grip I found, that gives me the most con­trol is to hold it like I’m hold­ing a pen­cil with the frog (see here) under­neath my thumb, and my mid­dle fin­ger press­ing on the back of the hairs. Not hav­ing my right arm to push back against the body of the gui­tar, I find it tax­ing to keep the gui­tar from swing­ing when I move my fret­ting hand.

Some alter­na­tives exist if you want a bowed sound with­out the bow. The Piranha Gui­tar Bow is a device that shrinks a bow into a hand-held pack­age. If you want to get even fur­ther down the tech­nol­ogy path you could always pick up an E-bow from here.

Learn­ing to play with a bow is chal­leng­ing but yields great rewards in the range of expres­sion you can coax out of your strings. If you’re look­ing to tackle a new tech­nique to add to your repetoire I would highly sug­gest pick­ing up a bow from your local music shop and spend some time mak­ing beau­ti­ful music.

Tags: Guitar, Guitar Effects, Musical Styles, Playing, Technique

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 8:47 am and is filed under Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.