Tuning A Fiddle To The Piano

Video Transcript

" Hi I'm David Kaynor for expertvillage.com. We are about to tune a fiddle to a piano. Pianos are essentially fixed pitch instruments for all practical purposes. You can't whip all 88 strings into a preferred tuning without a long process, so we tune fiddles to pianos. There is the 440A on the piano, and I have a quartz tuner set up here on the piano, and this is telling me that our A is actually is quite flat compared to standard 440. So I'm going to tune my fiddle to this, and to do that, first I will play the A, then I would play my fiddle's A ...and that is definitely off. One of the ways the fiddlers will do this is that they would actually step on the sustain pedal on the piano so that the A could ring longer. I'm going to use the fine tuners of my fiddle to try to bring my A down a little bit to match this. Once I think I'm in the ballpark, I will tune the fiddle's other strings to the A, and then I will recheck with the piano. Now let's see what we got. Some fiddlers like to hear a chord, and I like to hear a D minor chord—the A the D and the F—and somehow that makes my A string and D string easier to assess. Why that is I don't know. Now my strings are approximately in tune with the piano, and I can just play a tune and someone accompany me on the piano; we would sound like a band."