if Skipping = good....And Skating = bad.... Is it Skipping or Skating...?

I think it’s like she is bowing like normal, but then it doesn’t make any noise in places…
puzzling! Guess you would call it Skating, then.  I guess I will know more when I try out her bow next week...

You would have thought a Rehair would fix the issue!

May need more info to comment...fiddle tunes, unless it's a whole-bow solo air, use just a little bow right around the what Galamian called the "square position" of the arm. Most skipping or bouncing usually occurs around the balance point--1/3rd of the bow, which would be a more contracted arm. In fact, I'm sure you remember that's where you have the best 'spiccato' stroke.

In my experience, bouncing is a result of changing bow speed without compensation of finger pressure. Index, pinky, depends on where the bow is.

If your friend is experienced, then it must be a fault of the bow. More screw tension, or less? Angle of hair? Soundpoint?

Rehair--I've had to really lay on the rosin (Hidersine) to saturate the hair. The whole bow, uniformly.

Waiting to see what you experience because who the expletive knows what she means by skip?





Insert popcorn eating meme/gif

Clean the strings with a cloth or paper towel dampened with isopropyl alcohol, assuming they are metal or synthetic. This just happened to me. I thought I had a bow problem, but I had a similar problem with multiple bows. Cleaning the strings helped.

yes, some times you need to crush some rosin and give the hair a good dusting with it after a rehair, to get the rosin to work on the new hair. probably they didn't do that because they may not have known which rosin to use for the starter? i think it's probably best to keep the same rosin on a bow.

I take it the newly haired bow was skipping due to inadequate rosin take- up. A similar problem was discussed recently on violinist.com. My takeaway from that thread: you need to rosin the cr*p out of a newly haired bow with energetic motion all up and down; it requires enough friction to basically melt the rosin onto the hair. Some even recommend a softer rosin for this base coat to facilitate reaching the melting point. Direct heat could also be used but that may be a step better left to the pro's.

The answers are right here, rosin build up on the strings, inadequate rosin on / in the new hair, hair tension. For my bows with new hair, I use an emery board to powder my rosin and put that thick coating on the bow hair. I use what is on the emery board on the "chop" area of the bow. R/

NCnotes - "You would have thought a Rehair would fix the issue!." Yes you would, if that were the problem, so perhaps it wasn't.
I would also suggest cleaning the strings in the contact area between the end of the fingerboard and the bridge, Rosin builds up there and can form a glaze, so its like skating on ice. Some people advise against this, but you have to get it off somehow. I'm not sure alcohol is the best solvent for this, but I don't know what else to recommend. If I have to do this again I think I may try auto brake cleaner - the kind in the red can. Seriously, but it may not be a good choice for you.
Try her bow on your fiddle, and your bow on hers and let us know what happens.

I made the mistake of touching the E string right near the end of the finger board after applying some hand lotion in the morning. For awhile I thought it was me and my playing. Then remembered doing this and after cleaning as in "wiping" my strings down, it made a big difference.

Thank you for all the useful feedback, fellow fiddlers! :-)

Armed with this, I am going to go test our her bow on my fiddle.
And she can try MY bow on her fiddle, and we will try to figure it out.

For info...she's an experienced fiddler/violinist and plays in a community orchestra as well. She was playing a solo break ("Down by the Sally Gardens") at our St Patricks "gig"* and she came up to me afterwards to borrow my rosin because her bow "faded out" a few times during her solo! So then she got it rehaired...but still, same issue.

I will remind her to "rosin the cr*p out of it" LOL (it may take more than she thinks!) and clean off her strings, and maybe her rosin stopped functioning or something (maybe she needs to scritch it up again...?). We will check it out next week!

Thanks again!

*gig as in, unpaid playing by volunteers at a craft beer place on St. Pat's Day. Paid only in a glass of free beer, but at least it was tasty beer (I usually dislike the taste of beer)!

One needs powdered rosin to properly prime fresh hair. Scrape some chips onto a cotton cloth. Fold the cloth over and crush with something hard. The cloth too will get impregnated and that's what one would wipe liberally on the hair. Dusty business.

My method for getting rosin on a new bow. I put a few drops of 91% isopropyl alcohol on the top of the rosin. I then wait until it's mostly evaporated with the rosin still gooey. I then pull the bow through the gooey rosin. Repeat after changing direction of the rosin. Then I hang the bow up to make sure all the isopropyl alcohol has evaporated. Works great for me.

When I'm in a thrifty mood I use an emery board to rough up one of my various rock hard, miscellaneous chunks of anonymous, who-knows-how-old-they-are rosin. When I'm feeling flush, or am suddenly possessed by visions of a stern Isaac Stern, I'll use my seemingly always perfectly sticky cake of Pirastro Olive.

A bow can skip for a number of reasons. Some are simpler, like a dirty or unevenly rosined spot along the hair or buildup on the strings.

If the bow was rehaired and it didn’t solve the problem, the cause may be the stick itself. When a bow warps or loses camber, it can completely change the way it tracks on the strings. A twist near the head is often the culprit in this scenario. Sometimes this can happen due to the hair tension pulling the head out of line on a softer stick, sometimes it comes down to a spot along the stick where the wood changes density from something like a knot. It can even be the result of a past attempt at straightening or recambering that was not successful.

I once came across a spate of bows that had this issue. The reason for it was that the rehairer who was working on them had unintentionally gotten hairs crossed over each other. They were all unplayable.

Mystery solved! …turned out to be the simplest fix!

We switched bows…my bow sounded gorgeous when she used it on her fiddle, and no issue at all. So not player error..

Then I tried hers…definitely a slippery spot in the top third. Bow kept sliding off, losing sound.

So I got my rosin, and rosined the cr*p out of it!! Then played a fast intense jig using that part of the bow, and it felt normal! She agreed that it was fixed…such a simple fix!?? I inspected her rosin…all shiny and smooth and new…told her she needed to “scritch up” her rosin more…

And that was the fix!? A patch of unrosined bow was all it was, in her case…

But, Thanks for all the useful info, everybody!

Glad to hear it was a simple issue!

She is an experienced player, so I was puzzled how it could be just the rosin??! ( heck, maybe she got her bow rehaired for nothing! )

So I suspect she has an unconscious habit of not rosining the upper third of her bow enough…but thinking that it was enough.