Question: “There’s something wrong with my bow! I need a new one! This week when I practiced I sounded awful, all scratchy and weird! I even tried playing with my other bow and it sounded bad, too. Why would both bows go bad?”
Answer: When a student comes in with a problem like this the first thing I do is play something using their fiddle and bow and see if I have the same problem. So I tried her bow on her fiddle. It sounded fine. I tried the other one. It worked all right, too. Then Elaine told me she had been to the doctor for TMJ - pain in her jaw. Aha! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: any tension in your jaw will work it’s way to your shoulder, down your arm and into your fingers. I had Elaine consciously relax her jaw which she had been tensing up on account of the jaw pain. Voila! Her “bad bows” immediately fixed themselves.
The fiddler who fiddles with this blog
- Beverley Conrad
- Selinsgrove, PA, United States
- Beverley Conrad is a writer, musician, and artist who lives in central Pennsylvania. She's played the fiddle most of her life and has published books and once went on a book tour with her dog. She's currently working on a series of one hundred works of art of a dead fly to see where it goes, how it progresses.
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