How To Tune One Fiddle to Another

Video Transcript

Hi I'm David Kaynor for expertvillage.com. In this series I'm talking about tuning the violin and I'm going to demonstrate and discuss tuning one violin, which is very out of tune, to another which is very in tune. Most fiddlers will start by tuning the A string, the second string from the highest, and if I pluck the A string on my in-tune violin and then this one, my ear is sufficiently trained that I can hear that this one needs to come up in pitch. Until your ear is so trained, it's hard to hear those differences, and in some approaches to teaching, students are actually require to walk around all day listen to tuning forks so they can supposedly improve their sense of pitch. When I tune a string up, I generally tune it in stages rather then trying to go all the way from a very low tone to the desired tone for a couple of reasons. One is that the string is going to stretch anyway, and I just think, I feel like if I were a string I would of appreciate being brought up gradually. But the other thing is that I actually am afraid that tuning, increasing the tension rapidly all at once could result in either breaking a string or possibly pulling a bridge over, so I move a little bit more gradually then some people do. Now once a fiddle is even close to in tune, it is important to take a look at the bridge and see if it has been pulled significantly far from perpendicular to the top. In this instance, I have a warped bridge, and so determining its perpendicularly is kind of like hit or miss, but I'm going to look at it and judge that it is acceptable.

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