Bowed Instrument Neck Design Home  Bowed Custom Shop TK Anatomy The neck design on all TK Bowed Instruments is an interesting design concept. Over the years of designing various compact electric bowed instruments I began realizing that while playing both Vicellotars and Cellos, I constantly found myself needing to "roll" the entire instrument in order to bow from bass to treble. Now classical cellists will often use their knee on the edge of the instrument's body to do this rolling technique;  however, a classical cello has a completely different body design then these compact electric instruments. So I eventually came to the realization that the thumb (rather then the knee) is best used to perform this "rolling technique" I also realized that a rectangular neck shape was the most ergonomic compliment to this technique (as seen in the photo above). The reason I feel this is the perfect neck shape for the rolling technique, is because your thumb naturally moves to the bass side of the neck back when  fingering bass strings, and vice versa on treble strings, thus causing the entire instrument to naturally roll as you finger and bow the strings... You will of course need to use this thumb rolling technique combined with subtle movements of your body (i.e. rocking your body into the instrument for treble bowing and away for bass bowing) in order to play these instruments with maximum proficiency. This technique can be especially useful while bowing fast tempo bass to treble passages (i.e. the ricochet arpeggios of Paganini's 5th caprice).... ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Neck resonance" TK Bowed  instruments feature "chambered" necks and fingerboards: The reason for this is; due to the design of the Piezo transducers the body wood has little to no effect on the instruments tone. Therefore the neck and fingerboard is chambered in a way that will actually resonate similar to the body of an acoustic instrument thus carrying the acoustical tone via the strings into the Piezo transducers. The result translates into a more naturally acoustical sounding instrument.