What I've learned about (my) shaky bow

October 18, 2025, 6:47 AM · Has it ever happened to you that you could hardly control your bow in a concert or some other challenging situation? That you tried to fight bow-trembling by gripping the bow harder or even stopping to move the bow? That this made trembling worse, causing the whole body to tense up, maybe leading to the vicious circle of a panic reaction?

I've had such fairly traumatic events in my youth, particularly when performing highly emotional, soft and slow music in front of a critical audience. Since then, I've often felt somewhat uncomfortable when I played long sustained notes in pianissimo. What a shame, because the ability to produce sustained soft tones is one of the most beautiful characteristics of bowed instruments!

But I'm not alone. In an excellent blog post on Terrible tremors: embracing your violin bow shakes, Nathan Cole, one of the top-concertmasters of the world, describes "what I see every day from my seat in the Philharmonic: that shakes can happen to anyone at any time."

Now I'm happy to report that I've started enjoying it again more regularly when I play sustained pianissimo notes. I can only hope this good feeling will stay! For those who are haunted by similar demons, I thought it could be worth reporting my journey towards that better feeling. Certainly, the causes and potential cures of bow trembling are highly variable and personal. What follows, however, is not only a description of my individual experiences, but also a collection of excerpts from books and internet resources that might nonetheless be interesting for other people.

Yes, general psychological issues are important. I've tried pretty much everything including yoga and meditation, which was certainly helpful – but for me, the basis of improvement was mostly a change in bowing technique. Or rather, developing an awareness of techniques that may lead to bow tremors or help avoiding them. It had been clear for a long time that one day, I would have to re-learn trusting my long bow strokes – because I'm quite sure that my bow trembling was mainly caused by distrust, by the fear of bow trembling. But I'm an amateur musician playing only about four concerts a year in community orchestras, and thus the pressure to change something wasn't particularly great. So I put it off for a few decades.

Last year, I finally started addressing the problem from a technical point of view, with the help of many YouTube videos and books. The first step was that I was lucky enough to have found a very good teacher, Vincent Providoli, who happens to play in our orchestra and now occasionally works as my coach – my first violin lessons since I stopped taking lessons about 30 years ago! Still, it took me about six months until I figured out what, so far, worked best for me.

Of course, the first internet resource I checked was violinist.com, and BOW TREMBLE NEED HELP was a good starting point. In particular, the advice by Mathew Schneider sounded promising: "I needed to stop trying to control the tremble (which is a great way to produce a tremble)".

Apparently, I was meant to cure the problem by stopping to fight against the problem! Easier said than done, although it sounded familiar from what I've learned about meditation and mindfulness practices. In a second thread, on Shakey bow hand, the comment by Trevor Jennings was a good summary: "Any tension or stiffness in the bowing arm, from the back, neck and shoulder to the fingers, can often manifest as a shaky bow, so try to feel as relaxed as possible, starting with posture (...). Think of the entire arm as a soft and very flexible piece of thick rope." For me, this flexibility was key, which involved using active elbow movements, if appropriate also in relatively high arm positions.

So here's my summary of technical recommendations and quotes collected from some wise and experienced violinists. Of course, this is only my subjective selection for the purpose of this blog post – much more good advice has been given in other books, blogs, on YouTube, and by all the teachers who are regularly working on such issues. Unless indicated otherwise, the two main books I'll cite are:

Simon Fischer (2013) The Violin Lesson,
and
Kato Havas (1973) Stage Fright: Its Causes and Cures.

Stop gripping the bow. At first, this seems to mean: give up exercising control, and it may therefore seem counterintuitive when we find ourselves on shaky ground. Kato Havas (page 28) recommends "elimination of the bow-hold as such" as the first step to cure the fear of the trembling bow, because "the very idea of bow-hold (...) is enough to create tension in the fingers".

Instead of thinking of "holding" or "gripping" the bow, it is often recommended to imagine "balancing" the bow (Simon Fischer, page 43) or that the fingers "rest" on the bow stick, like the bow rests on the string (Kato Havas, page 36).

But how do we stop gripping the bow too firmly, if that's what we do? For me, the game changer was to regularly and actively create a feeling of softening the hand and bow-hold, as recommended by Henriette de Vrijer:

EMBEDDED VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJHf025nV84&t=384s

In particular, I've found it useful to focus on two parts of the right hand: the back of the hand (or rather the bones below it, the metacarpals) and the thumb. Observing and releasing tension in the back of my right hand was really my first step towards a better feeling. I now regularly scan both of my thumbs and try to release any tension, which means softening the big muscle in the ball of the thumb (Fischer, page 181). Rolling the stick of the bow just slightly between the thumb and the middle finger can also help releasing tension and thus to calm down (the fear of) bow trembling (see Nathan Cole's Safety move eliminates violin bow shakes for another approach to bow rolling).

Again, Simon Fischer (page 170): "Once you are holding the bow you need to use certain muscles; but when the basic condition of the arm is one of floating rather than of being held, everything feels lighter and more responsive. That is the starting-point from which you can go to 'relaxing the weight of the arm into the string', and all the other functions of the bow arm, and to which you can return."

Drop the shoulder down. Along with softening the right hand, dropping the shoulder down is the main cure recommended by Henriette de Vrijer. Further, Tobiah Murphy demonstrates how to keep the shoulders back instead of pulling them forward. Nicola Benedetti shows how one can bob up and down with both shoulders while having violin and bow in normal playing position.

Use elbow and upper arm to gear your bowing. Once the shoulders are relaxed and we have relieved the hand from having all the bow control, we can hand over much of that control to the elbow and upper arm.

For me, gearing with elbow and upper arm started with consciously performing movements in two dimensions. Fischer (page 121) writes about the horizontal plane: "At the beginning of the down-bow at the heel, the upper arm moves back; it stops moving around the middle section of the bow; it moves forwards during the upper half to the point." During up-bow, the same movements are repeated, leading to a "back-stop-forward, back-stop-forward" pattern in upper-arm movements and to a "satisfying feeling of symmetry". This may sound complicated, but, as Beth Blackerby explains, the same movements naturally take place when we reach for a doorknob.

Regarding the vertical plane, Kato Havas (page 37) says "it is essential to think of a down-stroke as basically an upward sweep [of the arm and elbow], and equally to think of an up-stroke as a downward sweep. This (...) will do a great deal towards the cure of a trembling bowing-arm." To support that feeling of an upwards sweep of the elbow, in this case from the middle of the bow to the tip, it is useful to imagine following the "upward curve of the stick in the upper half of the bow" (Havas, page 36). In practice, this would mean that over the entire course of a down-bow, the hand tends to perform a downwards sweep and the elbow an upwards sweep, creating a seesaw-movement in which the balance point of the seesaw is somewhere in the forearm.

I think the good feeling about letting elbow and upper arm lead the movements partly arises because "moving bigger muscles, moving bigger and heavier objects is actually smoother than trying to do the same thing with little muscles and light objects." This quote comes from a great video by Nathan Cole on Soft starts and smooth bow changes.

Open your shoulder joint. Related to, but somewhat different from, Fischer's "back-stop-forward, back-stop-forward" pattern of upper-arm movements, Kato Havas describes down-bow and up-bow as "open-open, open-close": As the upper arm moves back at the start of a down-bow, the shoulder joint opens, followed be the opening of the elbow. In an up-bow, the upper arm moves back and thus the shoulder joint opens again, followed by closing the shoulder joint.

EMBEDDED VIDEO:
https://youtu.be/blVwmz7h2IU?si=cI4CBu1kOVReUo_r

I've found that focusing on opening the shoulder joint at the beginning of the down-bow, and somewhat unusually also at the beginning of the up-bow, creates a great feeling of openness and control.

Let gravity work from a higher elbow position. I've long thought that in shaky-bow situations, keeping the elbow relatively low to relax the arm is key – but the opposite position can also be useful: holding the elbow relatively high can help a lot in letting the bow float over the strings, as if you were letting the fishing hook dangle from a fishing rod. If a high elbow is combined with a completely soft and relaxed hand and bow-hold, it can give a wonderfully secure feeling of control even in the softest long bow strokes. A higher arm position also makes the whole body more upright and open.

See Fischer, page 128-129: "Sometimes a higher elbow feels right, either in pp or ff (...). If the elbow starts off higher than the bow hand, you can get a feeling of 'gearing' (...), producing a feeling of great control and flow. Spiccato, and other bounced strokes such as ricochet, often work better with a higher elbow."

However, with "high" I don't necessarily mean that the elbow is higher than the wrist; what is experienced as a high arm position depends on the positions one usually uses. I guess the important thing is the individual feeling that the elbow is relatively high, which can happen when, as seen from the outside, the position does not look particularly high. And as usual, if we start playing in unfamiliar postures, it is important not to overdo it, to drop the shoulder down and back, and to constantly scan for tension in joints and muscles.

Related to our shaky bow problem, I found this video from a masterclass given by Augustin Hadelich striking. See how his hand and bow dangle from his arm! He says approximately the following (transcription is difficult because he's talking to someone who's not really understanding English):
"The main thing is to use as much as possible the weight of the bow. I try always to do less pushing and let the bow do the work itself. The more it's done just by the gravity, the more reliable it is in concert. Sometimes I feel nervous / shaking, but I can still play, because I use just gravity and the bow is making the sound.“ And from this Ask Augustin about spiccato / sautillé: "You can trust that gravity is always the same, even if the way you are feeling changes."

"Trust that gravity is always the same" is a great mantra that I try to repeat in my head from time to time while playing!

For explanation of using a higher elbow position when releasing the weight of the bow into the string, see also Robert Rozek:

EMBEDDED VIDEO:
https://youtu.be/IXFIxArQBjQ?si=dzrQEUbQZooX1hqJ&t=86

The wrist must be flexible, or, as a good friend and professional violinist told me: the wrist must be "permeable". Simon Fischer, page 194: "If the change from the hand being more upright at the heel, to more slanted at the point, is blocked during the first part of the down-bow – and then happens all at once somewhere around the middle of the bow – the bow may judder. The hand needs to 'follow the curve of the bow'."

When playing very softly, it is helpful to use a hand position with a relatively high wrist, together with a relatively high elbow. But even then, the wrist should be flatter when approaching the tip of the bow and must be relaxed and flexible at all times. Again, for an explanation of using a higher versus lower wrist position at the frog, see Robert Rozek.

Importantly, a higher wrist in soft bow strokes at the frog does only work when I trust gravity without gripping the bow. In shaky bow situations I often tended to use a cramped high-wrist posture while at the same time trying to completely control the bow with my hand and raised shoulders – which did not help but made shaking worse, as demonstrated by Nils Mönkemeyer.

Turn the doorknob while rolling the bow. Part of the flexibility, or permeability, and a great help for a steady bow stroke is to smoothly rotate the forearm, wrist, and hand to the left or towards the index finger (pronating) in the course of a down-bow, and to the right or towards the pinkie (supinating) in the course of an up-bow. A great way to visualize this movement is to think of opening and closing a door with a doorknob (as explained by Nathan Cole). I love this analogy because it also creates the feeling of a round and open hand frame.

During the up-bow, this rotation towards the pinkie can be combined with rolling / tilting the bow towards the fingerboard. Fischer, page 265: "In the lower half, it is often easier to play sweetly if you do not use all the hair, but turn the bow so that you play slightly more on the outer edge"; this "fits in very well with the bow arm: the slight arching of the wrist turns the bow towards the outer edge anyway. If you keep the hair completely flat, on the up-bow, all the way to the heel, the hand and forearm naturally want to stay flatter, and this may lead to a cramped feeling in the bow arm."

I get a particularly smooth feeling if I roll the bow not only by arching the wrist, but also by slightly curving the fingers when approaching the frog, particularly the pinkie, ring and middle finger. This feels a bit like I'm gently holding the bow in my fist. If using a 'fist bow hold', or some approximation of it, "is often a solution if a student gets a mental block about playing spiccato" (Fischer, page 283), maybe it works also during the mental shaky-bow block? In any case, a higher wrist position at the frog allows feeling the weight of the bow lying near the fingertips rather than at the thumb (as shown by Robert Rozek), which for me gives a much safer feeling.

To put it another way: At the frog, in pianissimo, it is often necessary to reduce the weight of the bow on the string. For that, rather than "holding the bow", a higher wrist position and slightly curved fingers give me a more relaxed and secure feeling of "letting the bow rest in my fingers".

Think of pulling, not of pushing the bow. If we are trying to move a heavy object on the floor, it is often easier and smoother to pull it rather than push it. When we try to draw a straight line on paper, almost no one would push the pencil with their hand instead of pulling their hand. Similarly, in a down-bow, it is relatively straightforward to imagine the hand (or the edge of the hand, or maybe the frog) gently pulling the bow.

I've often felt more uncomfortable during up-bows, probably because towards the frog I felt the increasing desire to grip the bow stronger to reduce its weight, as shown by Nils Mönkemeyer; but also the concept of "pushing" the bow upwards seemed to call for greater muscular control and thus led to muscular (and mental) tensions. During up-bows, I now sometimes imagine my wrist pulling the bow upwards. This naturally leads to a somewhat higher wrist position at the frog, at least in soft long bows, and gives a much smoother feeling than when pushing upwards.

Keep moving. Related to my somewhat uncomfortable feeling during long up-bows, I had a tendency to virtually stop moving the bow when the movement began to feel crampy in the middle part of the bow. The main cure was to open the shoulder joint and gear from elbow and upper arm (see above) – but I had to re-learn moving the bow in its lower half with about the same speed as in the upper half. For that, I divided the bow in quarters with tape as shown by Nathan Cole (in the context of the one-minute bow, or "son filé") and practiced with a metronome.

Fischer, page 13: "A common fault in playing down-bows from heel to point is suddenly to increase the bow speed in the middle of the bow. This is the place where the arm opens at the elbow much more quickly than before, making a speed pattern of slow-fast on the down-bow, and fast-slow on the up-bow." The latter is what happened to me during my up-bows, and I had to consciously speed-up using the elbow and upper arm.

Trying to achieve too much, using the wrong means? As Henriette de Vrijer says, simply trying to make the best sound that we can may lead to tension, particularly if we try to make this sound not by using gravity and weight, but force and pressure.

One reason for this can simply be unsuitable hardware. For me, part of the learning process was to try and let the violin speak for itself. However, my old student violin simply couldn't speak freely for itself – for decades, I was apparently forced to use way too much force and pressure to get to the sound I desired. My new teacher immediately realized that I needed a new violin, and he even found one for me that I could afford! (A recording of the new violin is here).

In the words of Evan Pasternak on violinist.com: "a continual use of tension to play very loudly and very softly (both of which will result in bow shaking) becomes a self-fulfilling cycle. When you come to associate loud playing with lots of physical force and soft playing with lots of physical restraint, it becomes very difficult to simply relax for all of it and let the small muscle of the hand/fingers take care of it. It takes of lot of time and patience to re-train your arm and muscles to not react to dynamics in such a visceral way, but doing so really frees up your playing to be so much more musical and creative."

Soften your face and start breathing. If you are not breathing, Mindfulness for Violin Players by Henriette de Vrijer may be a good starting point. As Austin Hadelich explains, breathing at the right moments can be practiced to mitigate an expected shaky bow situation. If you are watching the YoutTube videos by Nathan Cole, you can see that he usually exhales when he starts playing.

Are you frowning? Soften your face. Tense jaw muscles can negatively affect our entire bodies and minds. Try opening your mouth slightly while playing, for example by breathing through your mouth. If you don't like the facial expression this creates, consider smiling, which will positively affect our bodies and minds (especially when we don't feel like smiling!).

Know what you are doing. Nathan Cole writes: "it's important to be aware of your bow arm at all times, not just when it's seemingly betraying you! If you're accustomed to noticing your bow's nuances when times are good, you'll be better equipped to turn a shaky situation back into a normal one." For becoming and staying aware of my movements, I now regularly watch videos and read blog posts and books about violin playing; a good summary of bowing technics is Michael Schallock's post on The many motions in a single bow stroke.

Forget what you are doing. The paragraphs in Fischer, page 222ff, on "Staying out of the way – Not caring too much" should be required reading for any musician. A "clear example is the sort of wooden bowing you get if you 'hold' the bow and try to pull or push it 'yourself', rather than the smooth flow that comes when you feel a sense of momentum in the bow's movement, and follow it instead. If you want to draw the bow smoothly and evenly, the one thing you must not do is try to hold the bow and pull it in such a way that it is smooth and even."

From my perspective as an adult amateur musician, the first step is to know what we are doing with the bow. Then we can try and let this sink into unconsciousness, so that the bow knows what to do, usually without our interfering. I've found that I can follow the "momentum of the bow" particularly well by focusing on the movements of the tip of the bow (probably because the tip is as far away from my hand as possible, keeping me from an unhelpful focus on gripping the bow).

However, if we suddenly wake up during a concert because our bowing feels crampy, then starting to observe what we are doing only to realize that we don't know what we should be doing can throw us completely off course; so we should be able to recall helpful hand and arm movements. I guess the right balance between consciousness and unconsciousness is a very personal matter, and the optimal balance point may often lie somewhere in between.

Enjoy the roundness in your arm movements. I've found that a great way to forget worries about what the bow might be doing is to focus not on the bow, but on my arm movements, and trying to follow these movements with friendly confidence. Of course, a prerequisite for that is to know what the arm is doing, or should be doing!

I'm now regularly enjoying the seesaw-movement in which my elbow sweeps upwards during a down-bow, and downwards during an up-bow; and I'm enjoying the rotation of my wrist and forearm (pronating and supinating).

I'm also enjoying the arm movements in the horizontal plane. In soft long bows, it is sometimes helpful to angle the bow slightly instead of having it perfectly parallel to the bridge – that "the bow must always be straight" seems to be one of those myths about violin playing (about angling the bow while keeping the sound point stable see Figure 8 Bowing).

Consider that all those movements are circular: Because our arm, forearm, and hand are attached to our shoulder, elbow, and wrist, their movements can only be circular, just like the hands of a clock can only move in a circle because they are attached on one side. So yes, everything is round!

See also the recent discussion on Straight bowing, especially the comment by Jean Dubuisson: "... to bow straight, in a downbow you have to slightly "push" away your hand, and in an upbow, you slightly bring it in again. It helps to imagine a giant banana with its tip on your bridge and its stem to the right, curved away from you. Hence the term "banana bowing", I think invented by the violin pedagogue Drew Lecher. (not a joke!) The reason why it feels like you must follow a curved trajectory, to follow an actually straight line, is that our joints (shoulder, elbow, wrist) work in a circular way."

Since I've read this, "banana bowing" comes to mind quite often when I hold a violin and bow in my hands!

Find your own way. For all I noted above, and for all quotes I cited, there are probably people who would recommend something else or even the exact opposite. Like in other fields of arts and sciences, the opinions about violin playing seem to constantly evolve, and what looks like reasonable advice today may be judged unhelpful tomorrow.

For example, Robert Rozek calls the "back-stop-forward" movement of the elbow described above "too complicated"; for various reasons, he recommends moving the elbow backwards throughout the up-bow, so that the bow will not be parallel to the bridge at the tip. That means Robert Rozek recommends "banana bowing" as well, only the banana is curved in the opposite direction!

In the end, probably everyone must find their own way to play the violin.

Get your own way checked. However, it is easy to get into habits that strongly reduce our enjoyment of playing and, in the worst case, our health; and such habits can creep in without us noticing. I've learned that a good teacher can spot weak points immediately and, luckily, that one can easily change bad habits – it is only a matter of a few months or years ...!
Which means that from now on, I should probably constantly try new approaches and learn more about (my) violin playing.

Next steps. As a university lecturer, I enjoy giving talks, but often only after some initial nervousness has subsided. As an orchestral musician, I enjoy giving concerts, especially after the concert is over! So far, I liked the rehearsals much better than the concerts. But it seems as though currently I've managed to stop fighting against my bow shaking – maybe next I should try to stop fighting against my adrenaline?

I'd like to close with a quote from the great film documentary by John Beder, Composed, which deals with stage fright and features very open statements by various musicians. In minute 27:40, Peter Otto, first associate concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra, says: "... right before I perform, I have to almost meditate, and part of that is letting the adrenaline wash through my body. When you try to resist it, you tighten up your muscles; and so now there's always a moment where I have to just sit down without my violin for a good 10 to 15 minutes and just breathe really deeply while letting the adrenaline sort of wash through me. It makes my mind very clear and it's just a tiny shift in consciousness, where suddenly I'm chomping at the bit and I'm ready to go and I really want to go on stage."

Replies

You must be registered and logged in to submit a comment.

What I've learned about (my) shaky bow

Replies

Subscribe

Laurie's Books