Cello Video Lesson: Cello Bow Fundamentals

Hello and welcome to another video for virtualsheetmusic.com. I am Joseph Mendoes, I am the cello expert here at virtualsheetmusic.com, and wanted to thank you again for joining me for another video. I hope all of you enjoyed my last video on the Bach suites. That was a lotta fun for me to put together and I hope you also find this next one enjoyable, it's on a couple of different topics, mainly in regards to the bow. I think you'll find, for me at least in the future, that the bow is something I feel that gets a little bit neglected, I think, sometimes, especially in early teaching when you first start as a beginner and also throughout your development. Much focus is put onto the left hand for a variety of really good reasons, but primarily because this is where, you know, we get the value of pitch, pitch being a very important musical value. However, I think there are other musical values that are just as important as pitch that get neglected.

So we're gonna start with bow placement and the effect that bow placement can have on the sound, and also the other demands that picking a certain spot on the string place on what you're able to do with the bow and with the sound. So most of us are familiar with the fact that if we play a little bit closer to the bridge, we get a much kind of thicker, penetrating kind of sound. It's not necessarily always louder but certainly it has more presence. So if I put the bow just right there, you can see that the sound is very thick and penetrating. Now you'll also see that because I'm so close to the bridge, I can't move the bow too fast. If I try to move the bow too fast, I get a interesting sound, to say the least. That kind of sound if I move the bow too fast. Maybe some of you in your practicing have heard this sound and wondered where this is coming from. Well, it's just a mismatch between your bow's speed and where you've actually place the bow.

Now if we place the bow of course closer to the fingerboard and we draw the bow, you see how much faster I now have to draw the bow, and we get a much different sound. We get a much lighter sound. And this can be useful to achieve certain dynamics, pianos and pianissimos. I caution you however to not really go past too much higher than the edge of the fingerboard here. The reason being, when you actually...well, when you play in a practice room, doesn't make that much of a difference. Under your ear, certainly, you can hear the sound. But when you put yourself in a much larger place, in a concert hall for example, or even in a small...relatively small recital hall, maybe you're playing in a recital for your teacher or you're playing in a very large living room for some friends or something like that, your sound needs to have a little bit more presence. So generally speaking, that means that we wanna play only really from the fingerboard down, just in that area, never really floating above there, unless there's some very specific musical effect that we're going for, but this is a very rare situation.

So, let's talk about one more thing. When we're playing closer to the bridge, generally we feel more resistance. Now this is something that I've experienced with some of my younger students, that this resistance at first feels a little bit unpleasant and is actually hard to control. So we avoid then playing closer to the bridge. And what I mean by resistance is this feeling of pulling the sound. It's that you really wanna feel that you're actively pulling and drawing out the sound no matter what part of the string you're playing on. Now you're gonna feel far less resistance holding the bow or putting the bow here. You're still gonna feel that resistance and you still want to, but when you put the bow here, you're gonna feel a lot more resistance. And feeling this resistance and responding to it is part of the ways that we're able to not only tell where we're at without even really almost hearing it, you know, we can just feel the amount of resistance that we're feeling. But it's also...it's one of the ways that we can actively control our sound, is to really feel it in the fingers as we play and to feel that resistance. And we feel that both on up-bows and on down-bows.

The next thing has to do with... Okay, so let's say that you've mastered this idea of where to put the bow in different circumstances. Now, okay, you're in the middle of a bow and you wanna change it. For example, I start a bow closer to the fingerboard and I wanna move it towards the bridge, how do we do that? Well, there's some problems here because if I just kind of move it, you can hear that kind of unpleasant tone quality, where it's kind of sounding forced a little bit. I don't know if it's the microphone in the camera's picking that up or not, but I can tell you from here, there's something weird in the sound when you do that. And it's because it's very difficult, as you change, to kind of match up the appropriate bow speed to every single spot that you're hitting. This is why actually control of angle, of the bow angle, is the best way to move the bow around.

Now, if you're on a down-bow, and we'll just talk about down-bows for right now, it's the opposite case for the up-bows. But in general, if you do the down-bow right, the up-bow is gonna happen in the right way too. Up-bows are generally more of a completion of whatever you happen to do on the down-bow. But I'll talk more about that later. If I want to move the bow towards the bridge, all I'm gonna do on a down-bow is angle the bow a little bit this way. Now you see I'm exaggerating this a little bit, it's not gonna be quite that much when you actually see me do it. So you see how I can get the bow to move down and it doesn't really disturb the sound. Vice versa, if I start closer to the bridge and I wanna move the bow towards the fingerboard, all I have to do is really change that angle and move the angle this way, you see? More this way, I'll exaggerate it so you can see. So that way is gonna cause the bow to travel.

Now, maybe some of you have experienced this traveling bow before and you didn't really want it to happen. For example, you wanted to make a really, really nice sustained sound, like for example in the second theme of the "Kol Nidrei" by Max Bruch, one of my favorite pieces, requires that we're able to really control where the bow is at. And you can see, my bow is staying pretty well focused in the right spot there, and that's all because I'm controlling that angle. I'm controlling the bow angle and making sure that the bow doesn't drift. If I let the bow drift, then it really changes the sound quite a bit. You see, the sound kind of disappears a little bit and I get this kind of fluffy sound. So I have to really control with the angle, and really, also that kind of resistance that we talked about before. That's how I can control where the bow is and that's how I'm able actually to sustain and do all those sorts of things.

So learning this bow mobility and being able to control it will actually help you not only to move the bow wherever you want in the middle of the sound or in the middle of the bow, but it will also teach you how to really sustain, how to really make sure that the bow is able to stay in the same spot. It will help both of those things, so I really recommend that you spend some time working on this. And there's a variety of ways and a lotta different pieces where you can work on this. I know maybe some of you have studied the Handel, the chorus from "Judas Maccabeus". I teach that to some youngsters and that's a good kinda simple piece to work on this, to work on making sure the bow is staying exactly in the right spot.

So the last thing I'd like to talk about is the issue of what happens when we change strings. Because when we change strings, this feeling of angle changes quite a bit, and this is where things, I think, get a little bit complicated. For example, when I'm on the D string, it's pretty easy for me to figure out what straight is, I can just kinda look in a mirror and look straight ahead of me and figure out, "Okay, well that's pretty straight." I can also kind of place the bow over the bridge and kinda say, "Okay, well that's pretty straight." And then I can say to myself, "Well, if I use that same angle on all the other strings, then should be fine, right?" And I do that and I say, "Okay, well now I'm on the C string. Uh-oh, now I have a problem," right? I have to change the angle for each string. And I have to make sure that I know what straight feels like on every single string when I play, because this is gonna affect your sound tremendously for a variety of reasons, but for the principle reason being what I talked about before with bow mobility, is that for example, if I'm playing on the D string and the bow is staying in the same place because I'm really controlling the angle very well and then I take that same angle and I play on the C string, you see it starts to slide up. So I have to change the angle quite a bit to make sure that the sound really stays...or the bow stays really on the sounding point that I want it to stay. And on the G string, I have to monitor this.

So one of the best ways to really learn this is to get yourself either in front of a mirror or to videotape yourself and to really see what kind of angles you're using and how much your bow is sliding around as you go on the different strings. This is not an issue I talked about in the Bach suite video, the video before this one, but this is another kind of large issue involved with the...with playing Bach, is because of the amount of string crossings we're dealing with, we also have to monitor this angle. Now, that's kind of the, I guess, the bad news because it means that there's a little bit of work ahead of you. But the good news is is that once you really get the hang of this, you start to really hear the difference. And when you're hearing the difference when you're playing, you know, and really controlling the bow angle well on each string, it's really easy to kind of duplicate this. It doesn't become something that you have to do any sort of daily practice on. That's the good news, is that once you kind of get over understanding this idea, it's really not something you have to work on incessantly every single day to make sure that it's correct, that, you know, measuring your bow angle, making sure, "Okay, is it right today? Is it right today?" There's a certain feel and a certain sound that when you get those two things to go together, you've got the right feel here and then you've got the right sound, they happen almost automatically.

Anyway, I hope this video was helpful today, I know it covered quite a bit of different topics. And I look forward to hearing your comments, and please leave any comments or suggestions for future videos down below there, and I'll be happy to answer any questions you have, and respond to any comments you have. And I'm looking forward to hearing from you. Thank you so much.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

Thank you for your comment, question or request!

Comment/Question deleted successfully.