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Hi! I’m David Kaynor with expertvillage.com, and I am going to talk about how to make a
note. Well there are a lot of ways to make notes, and there are hot controversies about
many of them, but basically the bow hair has to contact the violin’s string and then
move over it, and you have to move with some degree of smoothness and speed in order to
get real tone. Merely moving the hair over the string can create a most unmusical sound.
To get that to become a musical sound, two things have to happen: my weight on the bow
has to be lighter and the speed of my bow’s motion has to be faster, so that these scratches
become excitations of the string. And I can go from scratch to tone if I’m careful here.
Then there’s the question of where the bow should contact the string. Generally it’s
thought that it should be between the end of the fingerboard and the bridge: if it’s
right up on the bridge it tends to be quiet scratchy; if it’s out by the fingerboard
it can be quiet thin as well. Somewhere in the middle is, I guess in some sports they
would call a sweet spot, the area where there’s the best compromise… and there you have
note generation 101.