1/7/23 “Use Less Bow!” Said No String Teacher Ever

But that’s exactly what I find myself saying over and over to my students when it comes to grooving. 

It’s something I learned from the groove master Darol Anger when we were touring together with the Turtle Island String Quartet.

I would watch him execute these impossibly fast and accurate grooves, both when he was chopping and playing rhythm, and also when he was taking a solo.

We used microphones on our instruments which amplified them through a sound system, so there was absolutely no reason to try and play loud to the back of the hall.

And one of the big secrets I learned from him was that the faster the music gets, the less bow you use.

Playing rhythm--whether chopping, comping or grooving in any way—is all about evenness and accuracy. You are the drummer and you have to develop a different kind of precision with your bow. And it’s almost impossible to be precise when you are getting a big classical sound and using too much bow for the tempo 

The rhythms get distorted, the strokes get too whispy and lose their bite. And it almost always gets behind the beat.

So, save those big bow strokes for your Brahms concerto. If you want to groove, tighten it up and focus on the subdivisions of the beat, the fast notes—what I like to call the Groovons: the smallest particle of the groove.

It’s just another example of different rules for different styles—or different strokes for different folks.

Groove on!

--Tracy