$30 vs $500 vs $5k Violin Bow Review & Comparison

so today i've got three violin bows that are at different price points and we're going to be trying them out and comparing them one of them is thirty dollars another one's five hundred and five thousand dollars uh actually these bows can go a lot more expensive and i don't have the money for that so i don't have in my possession but they do go up into the tens of thousands of dollars today we're going to work with this price point between 30 and 5 000 we're going to try them out have fun listen to them to see if we can hear any differences and also talk about what it's like for me as a performer to be playing on these different price ranges of bows welcome to another video my name is timothy and for those who are joining in for the first time welcome and thanks for clicking on this video everything on this channel is to do with violin and it's basically a violent geek place so if you like stuff like this please feel free to comment like and subscribe so let's get right into it a couple weeks ago i was at home practicing and i had all these instruments out on my sofa i was just looking at them and observing and i realized i've never actually tried these bows side by side to see what it's like in in terms of differences and i realized they were all at different price ranges i took out my camera and filled myself playing a small passage of the dance of the goblins and posted it on tick tock and i had no idea i was going to reach over 300 000 views in just a couple of weeks and i got a lot of questions people were asking me what's the difference between the spo and that bow and how does it feel as a performer and why is it so expensive and so forth and i don't have time to answer all those questions because my thumbs hurt so i decided to make a video instead because it's going to be a lot easier to put it on youtube than anywhere else and really can have more time to go in depth so i'm just going to put the video right now of me playing on three of these bows and let you guess actually which bows are which one [Music] uh [Music] me [Music] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] hey [Music] so if you haven't yet comment below and tell me which one you think is which bow which one's thirty dollars which one is five hundred dollars and which one is five thousand dollars [Music] hey alright so video number one was the most expensive bow it's five thousand dollars and it's made by a really dear friend of mine his name is michael van he's a canadian bow maker and i'll link all of his information in the description box below it's it's a powerful bow that's how i would describe it to begin with it's a powerful bow it's heavier than the other two it's got a great amount of stability it's very well balanced so it really comes in handy especially when i'm playing big repertoire so pieces that i'm playing in front of a big orchestra for a big crowd of over 2 000 people and i really need something that's stable heavy and dependable i can really just sink in so i can project the sound all the way to the end of the concert hall so i really saved this particular boat when i'm playing large repertoire so pieces like the tchaikovsky violin concerto the sibelius violin concerto shasta kovitch war horses like even the prokofiev sonata number two um so big pieces i really save for this one because it can handle all of that grit one really cool thing about this bow is that it's got a metal tip a couple years ago there was this big instance about ivory being a big customs issue so i know this bow maker he made sure that he put a metal one just to make sure that there aren't any problems going through customs because some of them are made with elephant ivory which is i think very sad but that's just how it was before but this one's not this one's basically vegan at this point okay so the second bow that i used is this super cheap 30 bow that i don't exactly even remember where i bought it from i think i actually came with a prop violin that i use and it came with the violin so it's kind of like a menu set in the sense like it's a it's a meal with the burger i tried to look on amazon how much i could buy it for i got anywhere between 19 bucks to 50 so i kind of just averaged it at 30 dollars and this basically has been my prop bow i use it for photo shoots when i record music videos when i'm outside even playing just for fun and i don't want to worry about breaking anything valuable and it actually serves its purpose well i mean i've never had this re-haired the hair has been the same since i bought it a couple years ago and the stick itself doesn't actually even seem like it's fully wood i think there's some plastic in it i mean it works it works actually surprisingly well for what it's worth i don't even know if you can re-hair it some of these cheaper bows you just can't even re-hair because you don't even have the proper setup to be re-haired i think it's actually cheaper to just buy another bow at that point because a re-hair usually costs around 70 plus dollars yeah that's the bow i mean how does it feel as a performer it feels fine it doesn't feel like something i'd be comfortable to play on stage just because the stick itself is very unstable i don't think it's even straight half the time and it's not if i want to make an analogy it's kind of like this is eating a twinkie compared to the other bow that i just played on which is like a really top quality super rich chocolate flourless vegan cake that you get at that super fancy french bakery across the street all right so the third bow that i have is the 500 bow and actually you know what because of inflation since i bought it over a decade ago it's probably worth 700 now at this point and that's still super super cheap for an actual professional bow and the reason why i still keep using this bow is just because it's so special to my heart i've used this since i was 12 years old so it's been 14 years and it's made by shastu boi it's one of the first full-size violin bows that i ever had to play with and it's really the bow that i developed my entire technique with so in some ways it feels the most comfortable it does a really good job of especially playing lighter pieces like pieces by mozart by bach it has a lot of liveliness to it to the stick and that's one thing that the five thousand dollar boat doesn't have as much but that's because it does project a lot louder onto the stage and therefore the stick is more stable this has a lot of vibrance to it so when i do play ricochet or really fast passages that need to be off the string it reacts so well and especially when i do upper staccato it just reacts like gold so one thing about this bow is that once you put too much pressure especially when it's needed for big pieces like big concertos what happens is that the hair starts to fall and break because basically the stick is hitting the the hair itself and it can't handle it so it starts snapping i remember i was playing and the hair actually started to shred and it hit my finger and the boat just swaying this way my heart just like beat so fast [Music] so let me know what you think about these three bows maybe you can't hear the differences maybe you can or maybe it just looks different i don't know for me i'm a violinist i look at these every day so for me they all look the same at this point but we'd be really interested to know what your thoughts are and comment below this is not so much a flex of these bows are so expensive or so cheap you know it's just really the reality of what i have to go through as a professional violinist is that we have to constantly try different instruments out and they are very expensive most of the time you know this range of bows is actually on the lower side i know some of my colleagues they have bows that are in the 50 000's or 60 000 and they're antique art forms and maybe one day maybe one day if you keep watching my videos and i earn enough ad revenue from youtube or something like that then i can maybe get one and show it on this show as well alright so thanks so much for watching this video again and don't forget to subscribe like and comment let me know your thoughts i always love hearing from all of you guys i read all of your comments i don't always have time to reply to all of them but i really try to if i can i'll see you next time in the next video and check out all the other videos if you want to in the tic tac video i played the dance of the goblins i made a music video of that as well for halloween so check that out so remember to also follow me on tiktok instagram facebook and if you want to get exclusive behind the scenes of my thought process and how i film my videos and so forth check out my patreon which is all linked below in this video description and i'll see you next time in the next video

Channel: Timothy Chooi

Views: 6,369

Rating: 4.967742 out of 5

Keywords: Violin, Timothy Chooi, violin bows, how much do violin bows cost, cheap, expensive, instrument, classical music, thousand dollars, comparison, violin songs, lifestyle, sounds, antique art, cello, cello bows, rehair, the violin, violin music, violinist, stradivarius, amazon violin, classical musician, dollars, cheap vs expensive, worth it buzzfeed, violin tutorial, violin lessons, violin song, violin covers of popular songs, twosetviolin, ray chen, horsehair, carbon fiber, violin bow hold

Id: _YK_W7wtzV4

Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 15 2020