Bow (music) in the context of "Violin"

In musical instrument classification, string instruments, or chordophones, are musical instruments that produce sound from vibrating strings when a performer strums, plucks, strikes or sounds the strings in varying manners.

Musicians play some string instruments, like guitars, by plucking the strings with their fingers or a plectrum (pick), and others by hitting the strings with a light wooden hammer or by rubbing the strings with a bow, like violins. In some keyboard instruments, such as the harpsichord, the musician presses a key that plucks the string. Other musical instruments generate sound by striking the string.

A folk instrument is a traditional musical instrument that has remained largely restricted to traditional folk music, and is not usually used in the classical music or other elite and formal musical genres of the culture concerned, though related instruments may be.

It can be made from wood, metal or other material; all the major families of instruments are represented. The instruments can be percussion instruments, or different types of flutes or trumpets, or string instruments that are plucked, hammered or use a form of bow.

A fiddle is a bowed string musical instrument, most often a violin or a bass. Fiddle is a colloquial term for the violin, used by players in all genres, including classical music. Although in many cases violin and fiddle are essentially synonymous, the style of the music played may determine specific construction differences between fiddles and classical violins. For example, fiddles may optionally be set up with a bridge with a flatter arch to reduce the range of bow-arm motion needed for techniques such as the double shuffle, a form of bariolage involving rapid alternation between pairs of adjacent strings. To produce a brighter tone than the deep tones of gut or synthetic core strings, fiddlers often use steel strings. The fiddle is part of many traditional (folk) styles, which are typically aural traditions—taught "by ear" rather than via written music.

Fiddling is the act of playing the fiddle, and fiddlers are musicians who play it. Among musical styles, fiddling tends to produce rhythms that focus on dancing, with associated quick note changes, whereas classical music tends to contain more vibrato and sustained notes. Fiddling is also open to improvisation and embellishment with ornamentation at the player's discretion, in contrast to orchestral performances, which adhere to the composer's notes to reproduce a work faithfully. It is less common for a classically trained violinist to play folk music, but today, many fiddlers (e.g., Alasdair Fraser, Brittany Haas, and Alison Krauss) have classical training.

Pizzicato (/ˌpɪtsɪˈkɑːtoʊ/, Italian: [pittsiˈkaːto]; translated as 'pinched', and sometimes roughly as 'plucked') is a playing technique that involves plucking the strings of a string instrument. The exact technique varies somewhat depending on the type of instrument:

• On bowed string instruments it is a method of playing by plucking the strings with the fingers, rather than using the bow. This produces a very different sound from bowing, short and percussive rather than sustained.
• On keyboard string instruments, such as the piano, pizzicato may be employed (although rarely seen in traditional repertoire, this technique has been normalized in contemporary music, with ample examples by George Crumb, Tōru Takemitsu, Helmut Lachenmann, and others) as one of the variety of techniques involving direct manipulation of the strings known collectively as "string piano".
• On the guitar, it is a muted form of plucking, which bears an audible resemblance to pizzicato on a bowed string instrument with its relatively shorter sustain. It is also known (especially in non-classical guitar) as palm muting.

When a string is struck or plucked, including pizzicato, sound waves are generated that do not belong to a harmonic series as when a string is bowed. This complex timbre is called inharmonicity. The inharmonicity of a string depends on its physical characteristics, such as tension, composition, diameter and length. The inharmonicity disappears when strings are bowed because the bow's stick-slip action is periodic, so it drives all of the resonances of the string at exactly harmonic ratios, even if it has to drive them slightly off their natural frequency.

The viola da gamba (Italian: [ˈvjɔːla da (ɡ)ˈɡamba, viˈɔːla -]), or viol, or informally gamba, is a bowed and fretted string instrument that is played da gamba (i.e. "on the leg"). It is distinct from the later violin, or viola da braccio; and it is any one of the earlier viol family of bowed, fretted, and stringed instruments with hollow wooden bodies and pegboxes where the tension on the strings can be increased or decreased to adjust the pitch of each of the strings. Although treble, tenor and bass were most commonly used, viols came in different sizes, including pardessus (high treble, developed in 18th century), treble, alto, small tenor, tenor, bass and contrabass (called violone).

These members of the viol family are distinguished from later bowed string instruments, such as the violin family, by both appearance and orientation when played—as typically the neck is oriented upwards and the rounded bottom downwards to settle on the lap or between the knees.