About the Tail Piece & Tail Cord of the Violin

Video Transcript

"Hi! I’m David Keynor for expertvillage.com. I’m going to discuss the tail piece and tail cord of the violin. The tail piece is the connecting point the lower connecting point for the strings and it connects the strings to the in block of the violin and thus to the structure the strong structure of the violin. Traditionally, tail pieces were made out of the same kind of wood as the fingerboard in pegs, here’s an ebony tail piece and fine tuners can be inserted into these little holes or in especially in the case of soft or tension strings like gut strings. Just the string itself can be inserted into the hole and then in many cases a fine tuner is inserted for the E string which is a thin wire string and quiet high tension and much easier to tune with a fine tuner. And then the tail piece is attached by a tail cord, or sometimes called the tail gut or a tail hanger, to the end of the instrument. And on a setup instrument it looks like this…there’s the tail cord attached to the end pin and attached to the tail piece and in theory there’s an ideal length of string between the bridge and the tail piece. This is called the swing length, and I don’t remember the exact proportion but I think it’s perhaps one sixth of this length, and it lays visually this appears to be approximately thus. Now there are several different materials of which tail cords or tail guts are made, this one is actually made of gut it’s dyed red, I think this is quiet old and it has these wrappings of some other kind of thread which acts a stop so that it won’t pull out when the strings are up to tension. Now modern tail cords are generally needed either wire or synthetic material, and this is a nylon tail cord and the length can be adjusted by using these little thumb screws, which once they’ve created the right length they act similarly to these wrapping on the old gut tail cord. And the tail cord on my setup violin here is in fact a nylon tail cord, so it’s a similar material to this, and underneath the tail piece it would look just like this. "