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For years we wanted a bowed instrument to play, but nothing we could find seemed to quite suite our requirements.
We were after a biggish instrument with a comfortable untwisted playing position that we could play while seated cross legged, which ruled out all of the violin-cello family, while the ethnic bowed instruments we encountered were either too small or had too many sympathetic strings.
Which left us no choice except to create our own. ( Our basic principle is that there’s no point building an instrument we can buy. For example, why build a guitar, when we can purchase one that’s better than anything we could possibly make? )
But since neither of us had ever owned or played a bowed instrument, before launching into some complicated construction, it seemed wise to test our basic understanding of the situation. So from scraps of hardwood and hardwood plywood, we threw together “Ektara”, the one-string test model shown at right
Playing Ektara gave us a first taste of the power of the bow, and more importantly, it convinced us that with our evolutionary approach there was no reason to worry about the proverbial difficulty of learning to bow. Since we were not trying to reproduce some specific established sound, there was no way to make a mistake, and right from the beginning we could enjoy ourselves. To be sure some sounds we produced were more gracious and pleasing than others, but none were wrong.
( Practice )
However we were dissatisfied with Ektara’s small thin tone ( like a no longer young bumble bee ), and therefore we decided to build an instrument with a proper sound box. The result was “Dotara”, which in Hindi is the general name for a two-string instrument.
Except for the finger board and the piece holding the pegs, it’s entirely constructed from scraps of hardwood plywood given us by a friend when we had just recently returned to the U.S. and were at our very brokest. We made the body a truncated pyramid because that was the biggest sound box we could make with the scraps he gave us, and because we knew it was a shape that would be strong even though it’s very minimal internal frame was also made of thin plywood.
For rigidity we made the neck an I-beam.
The bow we used initially was one made for playing the Indian Sarangi, while our strings are gut ones made for the same instrument. Nowadays we also use a viola bow.
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Dotara’s strings are held by and tightened with tapered wooden pegs fitted into tapered holes…..and since we did the tapering without specialized tools their fit is less than perfect and they would not hold unless we kept the string tension much lower than in a conventional string instrument.
At first this worried us because it made the tone we got while bowing both smaller and more difficult to control.
But since we only play our music at home in a totally quiet environment
( Performance ) we soon got used to dotara’s small but rich tone, and in fact quickly came to prefer it’s breathiness to the harder sound one gets from conventional high tension strings.
While over time we realized that the difficulty controlling the tone was actually an advantage since it put us in the position of having to cooperate with our instrument rather than dominating it. That is we had to learn to make music with the sounds our loose strings wanted to make. ( Practice )
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Playing dotara was so much fun that we started to wonder what it would be like to play a larger deeper toned even more resonant member of our Bowus Family, and so we proceeded to build Bass Bowus, an 8 ft. long instrument with only a single string.
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We gave it just a single string because we wanted to concentrate on bowing, and since then the development of our music has shown this to have been a happy decision. For one thing, after playing Bass Bowus for several years, our bowing technique improved so much that Dotara got easier to play, but also the sounds one can coax from a single 8 ft. string turn out to be extraordinary.
One unexpected result of playing Bass Bowus has been to change the playing position we use for Dotara.
So previously we held it like a small cello, but now, like with Bass Bowus, we rest the end of its neck on a pile of books and play it horizontally. We like this new position better because it feels more cooled out and seems to lead to more cooled out music.
Like Dotara, Bass Bowus is built with hardwood plywood. In fact the bottom of one neck, the top of the body, and the the top of the second neck are a single piece cut from the length of an 8 ft. sheet of plywood. But unlike Dotara it has a proper frame of oak.
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Since again we made the sound box a truncated pyramid, most of the oak frame pieces did not have rectangular cross sections and ripping them to the proper shape was not easy with our skill saw.
Neither was it easy to correctly cut the compound angles for the corner frame joints.
Altogether it was a somewhat nasty job of carpentry for folks working without a shop and proper tools.
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The following pictures show stages in the construction of Bass Bowus.
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