Is Snakewood and Alternative to Pernambuco?

No!

Snakewood is for Baroque bows, which are used for playing Baroque music on Baroque violins. The wood is heavy and does not hold the camber (reverse curve) that is so critical to Tourte (i.e. modern) bows. Francois Tourte explicitly rejected snakewood as being suitable for his bows. We nearly cried when we heard that a vendor (yes, a competitor) sold a snakewood Tourte bow to a young fiddle student who was considering buying an IncrediBow (OK, yes from us).

Now, you might ask, why not use a Baroque bow for modern playing. We'll get into the details some other time, but suffice it to say that Tourte did not invent the modern bow just to be different.

Snakewood looks really cool, but it sucks for modern violin/fiddle bows. We sell a carbon fiber bow with an imitation snakewood finish and will post the picture in an update to this post, but gotta' run over to Radio Shack now to get some components for our new electric octave violin, which we are showing tomorrow.

Got comments...bring them on!

D.R.