Sul tasto
Bow over the fingerboard for a soft, veiled, flute-like tone
Related
Sul tasto means bowing over the fingerboard. This point lies nearer the end of the string, where higher harmonics are hard to excite, so the sound becomes soft, dark and veiled, as if heard through gauze; it suits distant, hazy or whispered passages and approaches the flute-like flautando colour.
It softens the sound as a mute does, but by a different mechanism. The usual mistake is to treat sul tasto as a mute: nothing is clamped to the instrument and the string still vibrates freely — only the contact point has moved. It can still swell and fade, and can even be loud, but the colour stays soft and coreless.
Sources
- sul tasto 的弓位与音色，参 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, "Sul tasto"；本文为原创表述
Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.