How to Hold a Cello Bow

Video Transcript

Hi. I'm Melanie Yarger at Milano Music Center in Mesa, Arizona for Expert Village. In the last segment, we spoke about holding the cello and the correct posture for holding and playing cello. Now, we're going to talk about holding the bow. It's very important to hold the bow correctly because I can sit here without the bow and it makes no sound. The bow is what makes sound on the cello. So it's very, very important to hold it correctly and loosely. So, what we do typically is put our thumb next to the frog. In the parts of the bow we spoke about the frog. So right at the tip of the frog there, wrap these two fingers around so the fingers, tips of the fingers are touching the bottom of the frog and then just loosely lay the other two fingers over top. That's all we need to do. Flat wrists and flat-ish knuckles. As long as your fingers are loose, you'll have a great bow grip. We can test our bow grip by pulling the bow across the string. If it's a nice round sound, chances are it's a nice, loose bow grip. A tense bow grip is very tight and is going to sound much more forced. I'm not pressing any harder, I'm just tensing up my hand and that's creating the sound that we don't want. A loose bow grip is a nice round sound. And that's how to hold a bow.

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