How to Tune a Fiddle

Video Transcript

Hi! I'm David Kaynor on behalf of expertvillage.com. You can learn more about me and what I do at www.davidkaynor.com, my website. I'm going to talk about tuning the violin. Now if my strings were seriously out of tune, I’d have to tune with a peg. And this is the old traditional way of tuning, and many violin players still use pegs exclusively and don’t even have fine tuners on their bridges and all. I will show that in just a minute. But if my string were significantly out of tune, it would be a very unsatisfying sound. And what I will do is bring the string up to as close as possible to the right pitch, and I tune the peg gradually rather than abruptly. And I try to support the peg with a finger on the peg box, opposite of the peg, because there’s actually quite a bit of stress, and if I were to push hard on the peg while holding the instrument down on the body, there is a lot of lateral stress, which could be injurious. So I support the peg box opposite where I'm pressing. And I get up into the ballpark. And a violinist again would use the peg. I can do that; I prefer to use fine tuners. And the question comes up should one use fine tuners on one’s instrument. Some real strict traditionalists will say no, you are suppose to do it all with pegs. A lot of us who aren’t strict traditionalists, but just want to play the instrument in tune as quickly as possible, say any kind of hardware that speeds up that process is welcome. And when all said and done…

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