Being a professional musician and playing alongside other players enables me to play my bows myself to feel and hear how they work, but also to see them under other fingers, and receive feedback from some of the finest period musicians in the U.K. This is especially important for the cello and double bass as they are instruments I don’t play myself.
The bows I make are mainly copies of extant originals, ones I have seen, played and measured myself; either from other players, or museum collections. There are very few extant bows from before the 1700s, but fortunately many of the painters from this period have very exact details: one can measure the strings, see length, wood species, colour of hair from the paintings, and I am very happy to reconstruct bows from iconography.
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