Moving the Bridge: Changing Violin Strings

Video Transcript

Hi I'm David Kaynor for expertvillage.com. I'm in the midst of a discussion of changing the strings on a violin, and I would like to direct some attention to the very important process of checking and maintaining the proper bridge orientation. And then I'm going to actually show how I change a bridge. That was a significant, pulled it significantly forward toward the end of fingerboard. The sort of standard user-friendly way to do this is to put the fiddle between the knees. It is reasonably secure as long as you got any kind of abductor muscles in your legs, and then what I tend to do is put my thumbs on the side of the bridge closest to me, and then I put my second fingers opposite my thumbs, and I put my first fingers roughly opposite my thumbs; and see how my first fingers are between the E and the A and between the G and the D. Now I have a relatively controllable grip on the bridge. Now what I will do is very, very slowly ease the bridge back a little bit. How much? I can't tell unless I, once again, eyeball the bridge. In my opinion, that is still leaning a little bit forward. So I'm going to repeat the process, and I'm going to probably do this two more times, and I know that it could be boring to watch me to do this, but maybe one more time. The idea being that these movements are best done in modest amounts, rather then just trying to pull the bridge back all at once, which could break it. I'm going to call that good. So we can say that the A string, with a little bit of stretching, is going to be hopefully... I'm tuning the A to the E cause that is a old string and it is not stretching anymore. These strings are new and they are continuing to stretch. But the A string is now installed at least, and I can adjust its pitch a little bit later.

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