Bowing

The right hand makes the sound. Everything people admire about a sarangi tone — that it seems to breathe, that it sounds like a voice — is the bow, not the fingers.

Long bows first, for longer than you want to

The foundation exercise is one note, held for the full length of the bow, at exactly the same volume from beginning to end. Then the same coming back. Nothing else. Ram Narayan — the greatest player the sarangi family has produced — taught that students should practise very slowly, using the whole bow, and keep up and down strokes clearly distinct from each other.

The exercise

  1. Open thick string, bow near the bridge.
  2. Four seconds down. Stop. Four seconds up.
  3. Listen for the joins. Can you hear where the stroke changed direction? The goal is that you cannot.
  4. Five minutes. Every session.
Why it is hard at the tip. Near the frog the weight of your arm sits over the string. As the bow extends, that weight is further away, so keeping the same pressure takes progressively more work. Most beginners fade out over the second half of every stroke without hearing it.

Weight, speed and contact point

Three things control the sound, and they trade off against each other:

ChangeMore of itLess of it
Weight on the string Louder, then harsh and choked Softer, then thin and whistling
Speed of the stroke Louder and brighter, but the note is over sooner Longer notes, but needs less weight or it scrapes
Closer to the bridge Firm, bright, loud; takes more weight Woolly, vague, quiet

The single most common fault is too much weight with too little speed, which produces a crushed, scraping sound. If it sounds harsh, the fix is almost always to let go rather than to press differently.

Pressure is regulated by the first two fingers on the stick, not by squeezing the whole hand. The rest of the hand supports the weight. See the bow grip.

Crossing strings

On a four-string instrument with the drone pair in the middle, string crossing is unavoidable and it is fiddly. The two melody strings are on the outside, so getting from the low one to the high one means passing over both drone strings.

  1. Practise the change on its own: low melody string, drone pair, high melody string, back down. Slowly.
  2. The change comes from rolling the stick and a small movement of the whole arm, not from lifting the bow off and putting it back down.
  3. Aim to make the crossing inaudible in the middle of a phrase, and deliberate when you want the drone to sound.
Crossing onto the drone deliberately is a technique, not a mistake — it is how you punctuate a phrase and remind the listener where Sa is. See The drone pair.

Up bow and down bow

They are not the same. A down bow starts with the weight of the arm already over the string and naturally begins strong; an up bow has to be helped at the start and naturally grows. Players use this: a phrase that should arrive rather than announce itself starts on an up bow.

Ram Narayan was specific that a new phrase should begin with an up bow. Try a phrase both ways and listen to which one leans forward.

Same notes, your choice of stroke

The second version separates the notes. Neither is more correct; the difference is what you are choosing when you decide where the bow changes.

Bowing rhythm

Nepali folk music is dance music as often as it is song, and the bow is what carries the rhythm. In jhyaure, the six-beat cycle that most of the repertoire sits in, the bow tends to group the beats the way the madal does — in twos against threes — with a small accent where the madal accents.

  1. Set the metronome in the practice bar to 6 beats.
  2. Bow one stroke per beat on an open string, accenting beats 1 and 4.
  3. Then two strokes per beat. Then one stroke across three beats.
Short strokes are not small versions of long strokes. For fast rhythmic playing the bow works near the middle or tip with the hand slightly raised, and the movement is mostly wrist. Trying to play fast passages with big whole-arm strokes is why they fall apart.

Next

Where the notes lie