After weeks, maybe months of cello lessons, you finally develop that natural sense of how to get good sound with your bow. You draw your full bow freely across the strings, probably near the fingerboard, and get a vibrant response. Wonderful. But don’t start taking it easy up there. Now you need to get comfortable playing closer to the bridge.

And that means that for a while your tone is probably going to get scratchy and harsh again. There’s more friction near the bridge than there is toward the fingerboard, making the bow seem harder to control. Not only does it squawk, but it squawks loudly.

Work on it, though, because it’ll get better, and when it does you’ll have a lot of important, good sounds at your disposal. The basic sound near the bridge is brighter than at the fingerboard, which gives you more colors to work with and more clarity, making it easier for you to project over a piano or out into a reverb-erant room. And even though that friction makes it feel like your bow is out of control at first, the extra tension facilitates quicker string response, which means you’ll event-ually have access to a wider range of color and dynamics.

Cello professor Elizabeth Morrow likes to use an analogy that her students at the University of Texas at Arlington don’t quite get, because it involves snow. “It’s like skiing,” she says. “When you have friction on powder, you have much more control than when you’re skiing on ice. It’s easy to ski on ice and you can go quickly, but you have no control to do anything but fall.

“When you move close to the bridge, you have more control with bow distribution; you have the option of not using the whole bow, which is not an option close to the fingerboard, where you have to use the whole bow just to keep the string vibrating. And closer to the bridge, you begin to excite the overtone series, so you have the brighter end of the spectrum, which helps you in determining intonation, in hearing pitch. Near the finger-board, the tone can be dull and
the pitch can sound flat.”