Bought one on the internet for $69 bucks. My bass doesn't seem to mind, and audiences I play for can't tell the difference, or couldn't care less. Saving the $6 grand to invest in my Brescian custom build...soon as we can get back to gigging.😕

Big props to the Finale bow. A colleague and I once sat down with a Finale Coda bow and compared them to our Reid Hudson and Robert Dow bows to record excerpts... Finale bow sounded more like a 1500$ bow for sure, great deal!

Great Information! Best bow I have used was made by Hink te Hietbrink, Dutch bow maker, made from ironwood. Makes my basses sing as loud or soft as I ask.

I love my (cheap) Carbondix bow. Other players have informed me that carbon bows in general lose their sound as it travels. Would be cool to see a video with the spectrogram up close and another far away in a hall!

I dig that Dolling - for me there is a warmth, colour about the Pernambuco that rocks and that you can't get with the other 2, but you know this is such a personal thing... Just had a crazy thought, be interesting to hear a whole bass section playing different bows !

Thanks for the sound clip comparison at the end. The Finale bows seem like a great value. Do you have a sense of how they compare to CodaBows?

The bow matters so much more than the bass! As you say, life becomes so much easier when you have a bow that suits you. I've been lucky enough to go through some great bows over the years but I got one from the extremely lovely Sue Lipkins a couple of years back and I think it's my bow for life. She not only makes wonderful bows, she's also a gorgeous lady and I can't recommend her highly enough.

Recently got a Raposo for 2K and I am done. Ha... Love the bow to pieces though. My previous bow was a Tomassi and I just recently discovered that Joe Conyers uses the same one in some of his videos. Just proves that the majority of the output is dependent of the wielder. For reference, it was a brazilwood guesstimated to be worth around 800, but it came paired with my bass when I got it.

i've had the Finale bow for over a decade as well. i have no real complaints.

Where are the Finale bows made?

The Dolling doesn’t have the bottom end that the finale and Mohr have. Interesting. More high end information is sometimes appealing when playing bass but on playback I dig the finale and the mohr. Nice video Jason.

Just watched this! Cool vid!

Interesting video, I actually never thought that much about bows, never had the money to buy or the real need to upgrade the bow, never actually played a 6000$ bow, personal opinion I can ear difference between the different bows, but not better just different, I would definitely not buy a 6000$ , it just doesn't justify the difference, I think a 1000$ bow with good setup and hair can play as good

I have a Bob Berg bow, might be a New Zealand thing but interested to know if you've heard of them :)

Interesting!! I really must listen to this on the [very good] sound system on my desk top computer. The phone doesn't do this video justice.

One quick question do old retain the price? Or they lose value over the years?

What luthier made your bass? and what basses would you reccomend that sound similar in the 10k price range?

The price jumps between "entry level", medium and expensive are not really comparable. $350 to $3500 and then up to $6000. Is there anything in the say $1000 to $1500 category that would make it significantly different than the entry level and medium level?

Which do you prefer, French Bow or German Bow?

the best one for me was the second. It has more ge ntle sound

I think your own long-time bow resides in the tone / dollar (or even just tone) Goldilocks Zone... FTW.

Your Dolling should have a german frog on it! 🙂

Hi .... we should do a lot of exercises from 0 how to start playing with the bow. the practice is the best ,,, we are waiting for the lessons

Love my two David Forbes bows. The first one is a Sartori style, and light. It won First Prize with the Violin Society of America. the second is a copy of an 1842 bow with large frog and big, but light stick. Love it for period pieces.

It would be really interesting to try all three with the same hair

If I had the choice, I would go with the Mohr bow.

6k for a bow??? that's insane!

I’m surprised how much of a difference there was. The expensive bows seemed to have more in the high end, but the finale seemed to handle the low notes pretty well

The Mohr clearly sounds the best in this recording. Of course, he's won tons of competitions. Alternative woods have historically been very successful with bass bows. I have brazilwood bows by Lapierre (1963) and EF Ouchard (ca 1930) whose sound is superior to most pernambuco bows I've played. There are many fine Bazin and Morizots in brazilwood, too (1880s-1950s), that are cheaper than that Mohr. I have a Bazin shop bow in European Ash, and I played a Lupot (1830s) in ironwood. Peccatte and his school made quite a lot of bows in these non-pernambuco woods. In terms of modern makers, in undergrad, my teacher and other students all agreed that a snakewood Reid Hudson German bow was better than the teacher's H.R. Pfretzschner. And when I took bow making classes at University of New Hampshire, more advanced students had made some quite nice bows in bloodwood. So, two notes on what you said: When you talk about having "a hard time finding non-pernambuco tonewoods that [you] really like," you 1) are echoing a common superstition among string players that is rooted in the post-Voirin style but opposed to the practices of the hugely successful but out-of-fashion Peccatte school; or 2) are not looking at the right bows--my best brazilwood bows draw sound of a quality competitive with my pernambuco JA Vigneron, CC Husson, and Louis Bazin bows. Second, while Katalox itself may be a novelty, it is a close cousin to ironwood (same genus of swartzia), which Stephen Marvin claims to see in bows as early as 1780. Alternative woods are nothing new, and we as consumers should be asking good makers to return (for it would be no experiment) to alternatives that are both more sustainable and historically accepted. We should in all cases absolutely boycott Chinese and Brazilian bows made from pernambuco, because they enter the U.S. through an enforcement loophole, and there is a large amount of evidence supporting the inference that their source wood is illegal--in violation of CITES (international law) and the Lacey Act (U.S. domestic law).

I don't think the slight difference in sound, which there was, is worth the vast difference in price.

subtitles in Spanish please! 🥺