Erin Shrader's Page

“Hey Erin, you got any doreeze?” someone called out from across the room of bow makers quietly working at their benches. Lost in the task of fitting a frog to its stick, and having not a clue what ‘doreeze’ might be, I startled and the frog went flying. I heard it land on the concrete floor. Without daring to look yet, I took a deep breath and asked what ‘doreeze” was.

“Door-Ease, you know. I use it to grease the screw. Um…did I make you drop something?” My colleague looked stricke

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Illustration by Jacob Chalkley

A Strings Community member recently wrote:

Its been a good six months now since I started the violin. It feels, at this point, like buying a new car: you know how everything works, but you don't know how to drive, and when you do its scary. On some roads you feel li… Continue

Every summer for about the past ten years I’ve been teaching Irish music at Lark Camp, an international music festival that takes place far back in the redwood forest near Mendocino, California. The Mendocino woodlands facility looks much the same as when it was built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps. The real heart of Lark camp is not performance or even the classes that fill the daytime hours—it’s social music making, especially the Irish session, since Irish musicians outnumber… Continue

“Your training is where you start,” said English bow maker Tim Baker. “I prefer to find a way that works, that gives the result you want every time.” He handed me a square needle file that he’d modified to perform the task at hand—creating the inside angle of the ivory tip of a violin bow—and offered to let me try it.

It was midafternoon at this summer’s annual Bow Makers’ Workshop at Oberlin College in Ohio. I’d come to Tim with a style question about the angle of the tip of a particular genre… Continue

“He actually is a rocket scientist,” someone warned me on the way to my first meeting with Jeff Van Fossen about four years ago. Van Fossen is the designer and public face of CodaBow, innovative makers of carbon fiber bows in Winona, Minnesota. Faced with meeting a Princeton-trained mechanical and aerospace engineer, I’ll admit I was a bit intimidated, but Van Fossen has had plenty of practice explaining complex topics in terms the lay person can follow.

Not long ago I had an opportunity… Continue