Colour strokes
Not strokes so much as sound colours — ways of using the bow to change the timbre,
almost always marked with a word. Most of them are just the sounding point (the-five-lanes)
pushed off the ends of the ruler, plus two "use the wood, not the hair" oddities. You met all
of these as words to read in Stage 3; here's what they actually do.
| Term | What you do | Sound | How it's cancelled |
|---|---|---|---|
| sul ponticello (sul pont.) | bow right by the bridge, light and fast | glassy, metallic, thin, eerie — almost all high overtones | ord. or nat. |
| sul tasto (sul tasto, flautato) | bow over the fingerboard, light and fast | veiled, hollow, soft | ord. |
| flautando | extreme sul tasto, often with less hair | flute-like, breathy, almost no core | ord. |
| col legno battuto | tap the string with the wood of the stick | a dry percussive "tick", barely any pitch | arco |
| col legno tratto | draw the wood across the string | a ghostly, scratchy pitch | arco |
| con sordino | fit the mute onto the bridge | soft and dark — the mute mechanically removes upper partials, like playing sul tasto everywhere | senza sord. |
| au talon / à la pointe | play at the frog / at the tip | heavier, more bite / lighter, less | — (it's a bow-place instruction) |
It's all the five lanes
Playing sul ponticello is playing in lane 1 and beyond; sul tasto is lane 5 and beyond.
The strip of string between bridge and fingerboard is a continuous dial of tone colour, and
these words just name its extremes. If you can sweep the sounding point (you practised that in
the-five-lanes), you can already do the two most common colours in music.
How to play it
Lane 3 first, full and normal. Then move the bow onto the bridge and play light and quick — hear the metallic shimmer. Then over the fingerboard, light and quick again — hear it go soft and breathy.
Try it
Try
Open D, three whole bows: ordinary, then sul ponticello, then sul tasto. Then, carefully, turn the bow over and tap the string once with the wood (col legno) — a tiny dry click. That little tour covers most of the colour vocabulary you'll ever meet in first-position music.
The usual mistake
Treating these colours as difficult: sul pont and sul tasto are among the easiest things you
can do to the sound — move the bow, and the colour changes. (One more colour, tremolo, has
its own lesson back in Stage 3, tremolo — you learned both to read it and to do it there,
bowed and fingered. The trap there is confusing its slashes with rhythmic beams.)