How to Tune the Violin for Beginners

How to Tune the Violin for Beginners
How to tune your instrument and be able to do it easily. First, let us talk about different types of tuners that are out there. You have some tuners that are actually designed for the violin. They have the instrument strings on it and makes it easy with little lights and green and red lights, tell you what side; which way to go and all that directions. These are nice, but again, they’re limited in what they can do. Also, you have chromatic tuners. Chromatic tuners are what I primarily like to use. A chromatic tuner, what it does allows you to do more than just tuning with it. You’re allowed to go through the whole chromatic scale or musical scale. To my tuner, I have a clip on it; this clip will hook onto the bridge. It helps tune it and makes it easier to pick up just a violin sound and not external sound all the way around the instrument. How to tune. Ultimately, you have to be very, very careful with tuning. I have a student of the violin just like probably you are, if you are a beginner student, you have fine tuners down here. These fine tuners are where you probably want to spend most of the time. You want to spend most of the time working with these fine tuners because they’re a lit bit more safe. But with your instrument, with it hooked up and clipped on with the tuner, you clip it on this bridge and it tells you okay your note is flat. Well ultimately, you have 2 choices. You can tune it by the fine tuner or you can tune it here by the peg. That’s just a little bit. Say you have an A that you want to tune, your open A. Okay. And it is a little bit flat from that. Well, if it’s a little bit flat, you want to use your fine tuners, just your fine tuners. But if you’re plucking an A and it is all the way down to G or F, it’s the way a bit lower, like a few steps. You don’t want to use your fine tuners because you are going to end up pulling them and spinning them all the way down, so they can’t be used anymore. So you want to make sure that you are using fine tuners, you use them sparingly. Okay, now with the pegs, when you are tuning with the pegs, you have to be careful. The best way, I suggest for students and beginners to tune with the pegs, is that the first deal with the string that you are dealing with. You go up here with your hand, you hold on to it, and then with a pushing force you want to push it and then do a little tiny click. A little bit of turn, not much. You go too much, you’re going to break your string. After you do that, you get close to the actual pitch that you are trying to go with, and then you can fine tune it with the fine tuner, as you can see how they came up with the name. This is a little bit about tuning. We can go more in depth, obviously, with the teacher if you are working with them one-on-one. It is something to be very careful about. But if you do it sparingly, in small steps and little things, you should be okay. Thank you for listening.