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Customer Review of Zarelon Bow Hair

Yesterday I received the "refurb" carbon bow with black Zarelon. (Below is a review of it which I sent to my cello "coach.") It is AMAZING!! I would like to send to you my favorite wood bow for a re-hair with the same (black) Zarelon. If you use testimonials at all, feel free to edit and use the below review as you wish!

Zarelon bow: It came yesterday around noon, so I've had a bit of time to play it. What I ordered (from Peter Zaret & Sons, Cleveland), was one of their "refurbished" carbon bows, with black Zarelon. $100. It took about 15 seconds for this to become my favorite bow!! Big round sound, hardly any bow scraping noise. The usable dynamic range is SO great that I could feel my playing improve minute to minute as I became accustomed to what the bow can do. Gentle, very quiet playing is possible; while it will burst out as aggressively as you want immediately!

It is slick stuff out of the box. However, to my surprise, it rosined very easily, and once "saturated," I was able to wipe it down and remove excess. That is the point where it started being magical! The fullness and roundness of the sound was startling. I am so astounded and delighted with this.

I do plan on having them re-hair that wooden bow with the Zarelon. Of my wooden bows, that one makes the cello really ring, much more than others, so the combination of that stick with the Zarelon should be incredible! I had begun to want more from the instrument to the point of kind of looking around on-line for the next step up. The Zarelon has given me that next step up for a couple hundred (once I get wood bow done) rather than several thousand. I like that!

The biggest thing is the ease with which it plays! I find that the mental energy which normally has been spent on bow sound production is now able to be re-directed to other things. This may be the same thing that happens with a really high-end "hair" bow, I don't know, but to be able to do that for $100 is pretty amazing. On top of that, the relatively drastic improvement in the instrument's sound, beyond what any string change experiment has been able to accomplish, is simply stunning...if you've never tried one of these, you should give it a shot!

Mark McNeil, West Bath, ME 2/23/2022