Overcoming the Physical Obstacles to Tuning a Fiddle

Video Transcript

Hi I'm David Kaynor for expertvillage.com. In this video segment I'm going to talk about and demonstrate overcoming the physical obstacles to tuning a violin. Tuning violins is usually done with pegs. These are friction pegs: the wood merely—the ebony, or box wood or rosewood of the peg— simply is held in place by the friction with the maple in the peg box. The pegs are tapered, so when a peg is lose, it turns freely; when it is tight, it stays in place. One of the problems of tuning is that as temperatures and humidities change, the maple in the peg box can change size, and the pegs themselves can change size and shape because of absorbing and releasing moisture from and to the air. So even the most well-tuned violin can suddenly spontaneously have a peg loosen, and it could be very frustrating. Another problem is that whenever a string's tension is changed, which the tuning process does, the bridge, which is not glued in place but merely held in place by friction, moves, either towards the finger board or towards the tail piece. So tuning a string will move the bridge. This will change the length of each string. So as a consequence, tuning any one string will pull the other strings out of tune. Therefore, tuning the violin is usually a multi-stage process. Still one other problem is that strings tend to both contract / shrink and stretch / expand when their tension changes. So if I tighten a string, it is now going to stretch in response to being tightened. Strings of different compositions would stretch to different degrees. This is a A string with a synthetic nylon core; it will stretch some and then it will stabilize. If it were a gut string core with a sheep gut core, it would stretch a lot before it stabilized. And if it were a solid wire core, it wouldn't stretch very much at all.

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