 One of the most common problems that I notice with incoming violin students to NCSSM is a faulty bow hold. Your bow hold becomes very, very important to proper tone production, to your ability to play some advanced techniques in terms of the way your bow works. So I want to make sure that you understand how the bow should be held. Take a minute to watch this video and see if you're doing things properly. There are a couple of most important concepts on the bow hold. The first concept is that you must be using the tip of your right thumb. I'm not using the flat part of my thumb. If your bow grip looks like this, you've got a major, major problem. You want to use the tip of your thumb. Now I'm going to turn the bow a little bit and you're going to notice that my index finger is over the grip at the second knuckle. These two fingers are laying comfortably over the grip and the frog and are laying just very comfortably and they're not really cramped up at all. And then notice the pinky is sitting on the top of the stick. Now a big mistake a lot of people make is they put their pinky out at the tip and it creates a lot of tension in their bow grip. You just want it to lay right beside the other finger on the tip of the stick. And this gives a nice comfortable violin and viola bow grip. You'll notice that my fingers are pronated or curved and that's an important part of the bow grip as well. And I think you can see that there's a real curve to my fingers here. So we're going to be looking for that as well. So think tip of the thumb on the little piece of wood between the grip and the frog, pronated fingers. You'll notice that your index finger is over the bow at the second knuckle. Your second and third fingers are laying nicely over the frog and bow grip. And in fact your ring finger is right over the frog and your pinky is sitting on top of the stick. Your pinky is not way out at the end of the stick but it's simply sitting comfortably on top of the stick. Another thing that you can note is that my right hand forms a nice backwards C. Notice how round my hand is as I look at that backwards C. If I flatten it out like this I've got problems. But if it's a nice round C I've got a good bow grip. Now when I hold the instrument properly and I put the bow down this is what my hand will look like. You'll notice that if my pinky is right here it's a good bow grip. But if I stretch my pinky out like that I get all kinds of tension in my right hand. So I'm going to bring it back. My pinky will be right here for a good bow grip. These two fingers are laying comfortably over the bow grip and right on the edge of the frog. This finger is over the grip at the middle knuckle. This is going to set me up for a great bow hold.