Please visit the Don Rickert Musician Shop. Related article: Helping People with Special Needs Realize Their Musical Goals: Part 1 of 2 Introduction Such measurements for determining appropriately sized violins and violas for children are available many places on the Internet. The measurements and test tasks we describe below are geared towards the adult novice or experienced player who needs to be “re-fit” for an instrument due to either traumatic injury (e.g. damaged rotator cuff), repetitive stress injury (e.g. carpel tunnel syndrome) or chronic disease such as arthritis and lupus. This article covers only optimal instrument size and not the ability to hold and control a bow. In order to determine an optimal bow, an experienced player’s self reports on trials of various types of bows with the goal of determining which bow works best. For the novice, a prospective string teacher will need to be engaged. When searching for a bow that works for a musician with physical limitations, the traditional idea of matching bow size to the instrument size is irrelevant. While on the topic of bows On the topic of bows, we tend to think of conventional violin bows (about 57 grams) and viola bows (about 65 grams on average) as the only options. There, in fact, are other options. We had a customer years back suffering from lupus (particularly symptomatic in the tendons of her wrists) to the point where she could not control a conventional bow. We tried an IncrediBow “Featherweight” (about 28 grams), which... Read more →