Posts tagged with
bowing

In Part II of my chat with Endre Granat, we discuss some of the mechanics of playing a stringed instrument and Endre demonstrates standard bowing techniques. He breaks them down into three categories. Legato Staccato 'Bouncing' Legato is the default bow stroke; no additional notation is needed apart from slurs if you want more than one note per bow. Staccato is a short, fast stroke where the bow starts and ends on the string. 'Bouncing' is a stroke where the bow starts and ends above,…
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Make sure you have read dynamic relationships before this article. What information do we have here? Three things: a pitch, a duration, and a dynamic. Pitch is not important to this discussion so let's not worry about it; everything we talk about applies for any pitch that is considered to be in the standard range. If we give this information to a computer, it would give us a waveform that looks like this: A rectangle. But what does…
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There are many cool French and Italian terms for different bowing techniques. The texts have explanations of each of the different bow strokes, but these explanations range from excellent to confusing to plain contradictory (just google détaché). These terms refer to things the section does 'under the hood.' As an orchestrator, it is important to understand these, as they are the rudiments of string playing. Remember that in the end, though, the important thing is to know how to notate your intent; the section will…
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