A long time ago, in the rehearsal before a concert, I had accidentally dropped and shattered a really nice bow that I was using. And sadly, at that time, I didn't have a spare one in the case ready to go... that is what happens when you have multiple cases with multiple instruments...

... anyway, I raced to the local luthier, and asked if he had anything... just cheap, so that I could make it through the concert that night. And it turned out that he had a case of 20 factory Baroque bows that had just arrived. Well... beggars can't be choosers, and so I figured that there might be something in there that would at least get me through a concert before I went looking for a bow properly.

So, working my way through all the bows... 19 of them were really terrible... but there was one that just worked! Who knows, the factory just got lucky at some point, and it all aligned to make a well-balanced bow that spoke clearly! Most of the others were hard to play with due to the weight distribution or the response from the stick. And talking to various bow makers and luthiers, they say that the hit rate is probably about right... around 5 percent for a factory made bow. Apparently, they get really good materials... but very much a random sort of crafting!

Anyway, fast forward to today... and I am looking for cheap bows that I can lend to students that play with us, and also ones that I can just bash around. I ordered a total of 6 bows recently... and to my surprise, most of them were passingly okay. Not a patch on my regular bows... but good enough. The main complaint that I have with most of them is that they tend to be to stiff in their response... sometimes, it feels like you are hitting the strings with concrete and it smashes back into your hand... and the other thing, is that they don't really resonate very well, so they produce a sound, but it tends to be duller in comparison to my main bows.

Still... like I said, good enough to hand out to guest students until they get something better!

... and apparently they come battery powered these days!

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