The Thumb's Time to Shine

Improving Your Bow Hold

In the last learning post, Controllers of the Right, we started with the first finger of the bow hand and examined the bow arm controllers all the way up to the 4th arm joint (yes, see the article!). But there's something that comes before that — the thumb.

We usually take the thumb for granted. This is a mistake, because the position of the thumb in itself dictates how much leverage we have on the bow and how much tension we allow in our hand. Too much tension in the right hand can have a real impact on our playing, reducing stamina and causing a shaky sound. 

Below is a simple physical exercise for the right thumb which is essential for bare-bones beginners, but can be very helpful for all players, even the most advanced, to try and occasionally revisit. 

The best exercises are physical.However important it may be to have the right approach and understand the purpose of the exercise, the most important thing of all is to give your body a chance to try it regularly and become comfortable actually doing it.

To help you do this, an explanation of this simple exercise is followed by a brief video taking you through it. Using the video regularly can help you do it without overthinking. But the description will get you there too!

Two Stories

A friend who played a lot of fiddle told me he was having trouble playing because of a tremor in his right hand which appeared only when playing fiddle, and was worse when he played difficult tunes. This sounded suspicious to me, so I asked Dan to show me how he was playing. Sure enough, he was holding the bow with a straight thumb.

His straight thumb on the bow operated like a cantilever. If you hold your arm out straight, and someone rests their head on your outstretched hand, it takes a lot of work to hold their head up. By contrast, if they rest their head on their own hand with their elbow resting on a table, it requires no work at all to hold up their head. It's like having a column or post holding up a building instead of a cantilever. 

If the thumb is straight, all the work of holding up the bow has to be handled by the muscle at the base of the thumb. Dan's muscle was working so hard it was trembling, causing him to lose some control of the bow and get a shaky sound. Not to mention that it felt so bad he was about to see a doctor for the problem.

But if the thumb stays bent, it's hardly working at all, and can hold up the bow like a post passively supporting the beam of a porch.

One time, I was playing solo fiddle with a pianist for a contradance. The caller allowed the dancers to go a very long time and my bow hand started to get numb. I was the music, so I couldn't stop, but while playing, I looked down and saw that my right thumb was straight. While continuing to play, I managed to slowly force the thumb to bend without missing a note. It felt like a superhuman effort in the moment, but it paid off. The numbness went away. 

There are a few reasons that this problem crops up. One is that we take the thumb for granted and generally pay no attention to what it's doing, imagining that it'll do what comes “naturally.”  Unfortunately, the most common natural use of the thumb is to oppose the fingers in order to grab something. But this is usually an intense and temporary action, used to pick things up. When using a tool, or holding something for a while, like the handlebars of a bike, we don't oppose the thumb and fingers or we'd get super tired very quickly. That’s not helpful in playing the violin—with either hand. What we want is leverage, not a powerful grip which wastes energy.

Another reason this straight thumb commonly happens may be because in the Suzuki method, kids are taught to grip the bow with fingers on top of the frog and a straight thumb underneath. Perhaps it’s thought to be a simpler hold for kids, but I’ve had no trouble teaching them a good bow hold using the exercise below.

The Thumb Roll

This 15-second exercise is priceless because it reminds the thumb to bend and save you a lot of energy — the thumb likes it because it might be the only time the thumb gets to be in the spotlight! Once it gets the feel of this, it will continue to stay bent, at least for a little while. It's good to keep coming back to this so that the thumb really gets into the act. It's not enough to understand this exercise; it really helps to actually do it -- and keep in mind, 15 seconds doesn't cost you much!

1. Hold the right hand palm up and lay the stick across the middle of the fingers. (It doesn't really matter where your hand is on the stick, though for the sake of the next exercise, it's easier if it's closer to the frog than in the middle.)

2. Place the tip of the thumb onto the stick, in the middle of the hand. (The form is self-correcting  -- you can't physically do this exercise unless the very tip of the thumb is placed on the stick, nor will it work if the thumb is too close to first finger or pinky.)

3. Bend the thumb until the knuckle touches the stick. This will roll the bow towards the thumb. Make sure to isolate the thumb muscle to do all the work of rolling the bow. The fingers could do it too but that doesn't help.

4. Now straighten the thumb all the way, rolling the bow away. Again, only use the thumb to do this.

5. Repeat #3 & #4 a couple of times.

6. Finish with a bent thumb, the knuckle (actually a spot between knuckle and tip) touching the stick. This is how you want the thumb to stay from now on.

Exercises are like puzzles. The more you do them, the more familiar you become with them, and the more details you notice, including solutions.

In this exercise, you may notice that rolling the bow is a by-product -- the main point is to straighten and bend the thumb, all by itself.

Another thing you may notice is that by placing the tip of the thumb on the stick, the fingers are not parallel to the stick -- the first finger is closest and the pinky farthest. This will give the first finger more natural leverage on the bow, to produce a good sound.

Not only is this exercise a helpful reminder to relax the bow hand of all players, it’s also one of the best ways to teach a beginner how to hold the bow, physically, without a lot of verbalizing that they may feel they have to memorize (and possibly misremember or misinterpret!).

Video, below

Doing the exercise along with the brief video below can help you focus on simply doing it instead of overthinking it! The technique videos are available to paid subscribers (and can also be found on fiddle-online).