How to Clean a Violin Bow

Video Transcript

"Today we're going to discuss how to clean a violin bow. Something I've here, a lot of people ask me about, they want to do it at home, sometimes it's okay idea, sometimes not a great idea. A lot of times you get a kid and the potato chips, way too deep all over this bow hair, so it's crazy, it's sleek, you got to do something before the big recital that night; I understand. But, in order to cut that, you're going to need something more than soap and water; I hear people talking about soap and water. It's fine for some dirt, but when you get greasy stuff on the bow hair, it's just totally nullifies the rosin; you need to get something that's going to cut. If you have a fiber glass bow or a graphite composite bow, some of these modern bows like that, really, this is a safe method to try at home if you're careful. And it's using denatured alcohol; Home Depot, Lowe's, wherever you shop, hardware stores have it; SLX or denatured alcohol. Just a little bit in the bottom of little cereal bowl, it's all you need. And this is where it gets tricky, be careful not to twist the frog as you remove the frog from the bow. First we take the button, counterclockwise 'till it comes off, and you got to be careful not to get this wrapped around within itself, so keep this from twisting and turning when its off of there. Now what I'm going to do, I'm going to lay the tip of this bow on the edge of the cereal bowl and I'm going to totally dilute the hair. So, you know, this is where, if you have a wooden bow with varnish and you're cleaning the hair and the alcohol slaps a little bit on the tip of the bow, the varnish is gone, you're down to bare wood; just not a good idea to try this. Shops can do it, I do it on wooden bows very carefully. So you know, work the area where the greasy substance might be, that's causing the problem in general and then when you take this out of here, that's what it's going to look like. Now I just squeeze it like this and get the bow covered out and then just take a paper towel and slowly work your way down, dry the hair. It doesn't take long. Now you still, you can wet this down, but don't just drop it and let it flop around because you're just asking for trouble there. Keep the hair nice and even, don't let it wrap around itself. So once you've dried it as much as you can and this is air-drying very fast. This alcohol will dissipate in thirty seconds, a minute the most. You can put this back together and you've got, basically, you've got a bow that has no rosin whatsoever or anything else, which is good and you can have to rosin like the daylights if you don't have some powdered rosin mixed up. In the shop here we have ground up rosin that we use to get it started with, our little rug, a little rosin, wipe it in to get it started. It's a good way to get the immediate rosin into the hair. You can cake rosin it enough and it'll eventually be find. So once again, you got perfectly clean hair, no rosin on it, no dirt, no grease, it's great. You can't do that too many times 'cause it ultimately it'll dry out the hair if you soak in alcohol over and over. But, just a good way in emergency to save a re-hair, if it's plenty of hair and it's relatively fresh still. Just remember, I don't recommend this with wooden bows. Let somebody else do that for you."