# Berimbau > A struck bow with a gourd against the belly - Date: c. 1814 - Era: Industrial age - Domain: [Textiles & Everyday Life](https://lastcodex.org/en/domains/everyday/) - Rebuild stage: III (Crafts & cities) - Difficulty: 2/5 - URL: https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/berimbau/ The berimbau is a musical bow from Brazil: a wooden stave bent by a single steel wire, with an open gourd tied near its lower end. The player strikes the wire with a thin stick, changes the note by pressing a coin or a stone against it, and colours the sound by moving the gourd towards and away from the belly. Gourd bows played by Africans in Brazil were drawn and described from the 1810s. ![Berimbau · A struck bow with a gourd against the belly](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/plate.BtrB1ABc_2mKBqc.webp) ## Legend 1. Wooden stave 2. Steel wire 3. Gourd resonator 4. Cord loop tying the gourd and the wire to the stave 5. Coin pressed against the wire 6. Stick and caxixi ## What it is The berimbau is a single-string instrument that sounds when the string is struck. A stave of hard, springy wood, about as tall as a person, is bent into a shallow arc, like a hunting [bow](/en/inventions/bow-and-arrow/), by a steel wire hooked over both ends. Near the lower end, a round gourd with a wide opening is tied to the outside of the curve by a loop of cord, which also goes round the wire and draws it towards the wood. The loop splits the wire into a long section above and a short one below. In Bahia the traditional wood is biriba. ![A standing player holding a berimbau upright in one hand, the gourd against his belly, the other hand raised with a stick and a small basket rattle](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v1.DS1L4osf_ZOCIcW.webp) _The left hand holds the stave and the coin, the right hand the stick and the caxixi._ The player holds the bow upright in the left hand, just above the gourd, with the opening of the gourd facing the belly. A coin or a flat stone is pinched between the thumb and index finger of the same hand. The right hand holds a thin stick, 30 to 40 cm long, and usually a [caxixi](/en/inventions/caxixi/), a small closed basket rattle filled with seeds, so that every stroke of the stick also shakes the rattle. Berimbaus are grouped by pitch: the deep gunga, the middle médio and the high viola. They differ mostly in the size of the gourd. The berimbau leads the music of capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian game of fighting and dance, and sets the rhythm and the style of the game. Its name was first used in Portugal and Brazil for the [jaw harp](/en/inventions/jaw-harp/), which Portuguese still calls berimbau de boca, "mouth berimbau"; the bow is the berimbau de barriga, the "belly berimbau". ## How it works The stick strikes the long section of the wire, a little above the gourd. The open wire gives the low note. Pressed firmly with the coin, it vibrates over a shorter length and gives a note a semitone to a whole tone higher, depending on the instrument. If the coin only touches the wire as it is struck, it rattles against it and gives a buzzing sound with no clear pitch. The coin can also stop the wire without a stroke, and the caxixi can be shaken alone. These sounds, combined in fixed patterns, make up the toques, the named rhythms of capoeira. ![The same gourd tied to the stave, drawn twice cut open: on the left its opening held away from a fold of shirt over the belly, on the right pressed against it](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v2.DXoUAEj0_1tYNHX.webp) _Opening and closing the gourd against the belly changes which overtones it reinforces._ The wire on its own makes little sound, because it moves very little air. Its vibration passes through the loop and the stave to the gourd. The gourd is a hollow with one opening, and the air inside it resonates, reinforcing some of the overtones of the wire and letting the sound out through the opening. When the player brings the opening against the belly, the opening is partly closed and the air inside resonates differently. Moving the gourd in and out while the note sounds gives a vowel-like change in tone that players call "wah-wah". The gourd's position on the stave also counts: makers slide it up or down until the instrument has the resonance and tone they want, and adjust the tension of the wire to set the pitch. ## How to do it Choose a straight stave of hard, springy wood about 150 cm long and 2.5 cm thick, without knots or cracks. Remove the bark and let it dry. Cut a shallow notch a few centimetres from each end to hold the wire. ![Upper end of a berimbau stave, with a notch near the tip and the steel wire looped into the notch and twisted on itself](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v3.DxwNs75w_Z1fuCkv.webp) _The wire is hooked into a notch at each end and twisted back on itself._ Use a plain steel wire bought for the purpose, a little shorter than the stave. Twist a small loop at one end and seat it in the lower notch. Bend the stave slowly, with the lower end on the ground and your foot against it, until the other end of the wire reaches the top notch, then form a second loop there. For the resonator, cut the top off a dried round gourd, 15 to 20 cm across, to leave a wide opening, and scrape out the inside. Drill two small holes a few centimetres apart in the centre of its base. Pass a cord through both holes from the inside, tie it into a loop and slip the loop over the lower end of the stave and the wire, about a hand's breadth from the bottom. Pulled tight, the loop draws the wire towards the stave and holds the gourd in place. A stick of hard wood 30 to 40 cm long and an old coin or a smooth pebble complete the instrument. Strike the long part of the wire and listen to the open note, then press the coin firmly against the wire above the gourd. If the sound is weak, slide the gourd a little up or down, or tighten the loop. **Safety.** A bent stave and a tight steel wire store a lot of energy. Wear safety glasses while stringing, bend the stave slowly and keep your face away from the line of the wire: if it slips or snaps, it whips. Bend or cover the cut ends of the wire, which are sharp. Clamp the gourd when drilling and wear a dust mask while scraping and sanding it. ## History and evolution Musical bows with a gourd resonator are played in many parts of Africa, and the berimbau's closest relatives are in Angola. In 2021 the ethnomusicologists Juan Diego Díaz, Matthias Röhrig Assunção and Gregory Beyer argued that it comes from the hungu of northern Angola, which has nearly the same size, grip and playing technique and is also strung with metal wire. Gerhard Kubik had linked it in the 1970s to the mbulumbumba of southwestern Angola, a smaller bow with a plant-fibre string, held horizontally. The first written descriptions of Angolan bows date from the middle of the nineteenth century, later than those from Brazil. In Brazil, European artists and travellers drew and described the bows of enslaved Africans from the 1810s. Díaz and his colleagues reproduce a drawing of a street seller with a bow by Joaquim Guillobel, dated 1814. The English traveller Henry Koster, writing in 1816 about the slaves of a plantation in Pernambuco, describes a large bow with one string carrying half a coconut shell or a small gourd, held against the abdomen and struck with a finger or a small stick. Jean-Baptiste Debret, who lived in Rio de Janeiro, painted bow players in 1826. His Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil, published in Paris in the 1830s, includes a plate of a Black singer, shown as a troubadour, playing an urucungo: half a gourd fixed to a bent stick, with a brass wire struck lightly with a small rod. Many of the names recorded in Brazil, such as urucungo, oricongo and rucumbo, come from Kimbundu, a language of northern Angola. Bows in Brazil were strung with vine, gut, brass or iron wire. According to Mestre Pastinha, quoted by Emília Biancardi, steel wire taken from car tyres reached Salvador with the first imported cars at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the coin came into use to stop it. The coin was often a copper piece of 40 réis from the Empire, called a dobrão; washers and later brass discs took its place. Writers disagree on when the bow joined capoeira. Paintings by Debret and Johann Moritz Rugendas show the game played to drums alone. Kay Shaffer placed the union at the end of the nineteenth century, Edison Carneiro and later historians at the beginning of the twentieth, in Bahia. Peter Fryer found bow players using a basket rattle as early as 1856, while Carneiro thought the caxixi arrived with the coin in the twentieth century. Today the berimbau is played wherever capoeira is practised, and musicians use it outside capoeira as well. ## Key facts - Bow player drawn by Joaquim Guillobel: 1814 - Described by Henry Koster in Pernambuco: 1816: a large bow with one string and half a coconut shell or small gourd - Length of the stave today: About 140 to 160 cm - Open note to pressed note: A semitone to a whole tone higher ## Requires - [Drawing iron wire by hand](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/wire-drawing/): A steel drawplate and tongs turn soft iron rods into wire (c. 1100) ## Sources - [Arching over the Atlantic: Exploring Links between Brazilian and Angolan Musical Bows, Ethnomusicology 65.2 (2021), pp. 286–323](https://doi.org/10.5406/ethnomusicology.65.2.0286), Juan Diego Díaz, Matthias Röhrig Assunção, Gregory Beyer, University of Illinois Press - [Travels in Brazil (London, 1816)](https://archive.org/details/travelsinbrazil00kost), Henry Koster, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, via Internet Archive - [Do arco musical primitivo ao berimbau de barriga: a trajetória do instrumento mor da capoeira, Revista Iberoamericana do Patrimônio Histórico-Educativo 7 (2021)](https://doi.org/10.20888/ridpher.v7i00.15788), José Luiz Cirqueira Falcão, Marcos Duarte de Oliveira, Universidade Estadual de Campinas - [Capoeira Angola: ensaio sócio-etnográfico (Salvador, 1968)](https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=Capoeira+Angola+ensaio+s%C3%B3cio-etnogr%C3%A1fico+Waldeloir+Rego), Waldeloir Rego, Editora Itapoan - [Berimbau's “use value” and “exchange value”: production and consumption as symbols of freedom in contemporary global Capoeira Angola, Vibrant 9.2 (2012)](https://doi.org/10.1590/S1809-43412012000200004), Celso de Brito, Associação Brasileira de Antropologia - [Review of J. P. de Oliveira, O urucungo de Cassange (2019), Almanack 24 (2020)](https://doi.org/10.1590/2236-463324er00220), Jaime Rodrigues, Universidade Federal de São Paulo - [Berimbau (Roger Vetter)](https://omeka-s.grinnell.edu/s/MusicalInstruments/item/2100), Grinnell College Musical Instrument Collection - [Berimbau by Perere, Bahia, 1995 (4203.2010)](https://music.yale.edu/browse-collection/berimbau-42032010), Yale Collection of Musical Instruments - [Berimbau](https://percussion.byu.edu/berimbau), Brigham Young University Percussion - [Berimbau: A simple instrument for teaching basic concepts in the physics and psychoacoustics of music, American Journal of Physics 82.12 (2014)](https://doi.org/10.1119/1.4894750), Rui C. Vilão, Santino L. S. Melo, American Association of Physics Teachers Fact-checked on 2026-10-19. --- The Last Codex · https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/berimbau/ · © The Last Codex. Texts, plates and figures: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.