Fiddle Tuning Overview

Video Transcript

" Hi I'm David Kaynor for expertvillage.com. I'd like to talk briefly about three very common devices...aids in getting a violin in tune. First is the old traditional tuning fork. This one generates a 440A. This is a very simple tuning fork; you could actually get some very large and very fancy ones which are extremely cool. But this one works; all I have to do is slap it on something hard, but not too hard, and then touch it to something that will resonate. Bingo an A. Now, sounds pretty good. Let's take a look at the next piece of equipment: the piano. A lot of time, fiddles have to tune to whatever is the lease tunable instrument in the situation. Frequently it is a piano, or an according, or a concertina. Here we have a piano. That is the A on the piano; here is the A on my fiddle. To a person who has not had a lot of musical experience, that wouldn't sound too bad. We who are used to it though would say that it don't sound good at all. That is what we would call dissonant. Let me play the two notes at once. You can actually hear a kind of a shifting back and forth of the sound, which we sometimes refer to as the dissonance beat. So we often resort to a quartz tuner to see who is right, and in this case we can actually see if my tuning fork is right, because I've got the quartz tuner all set to listen to it. Let's see what happens. Now as the sound decays, the quartz tuner starts to pick up other ambient sounds in the environment: in this case, the sound of computer fans. Let's try that again. There it is: my fork is right on. The last thing is that a lot of these quartz tuners will generate their own sound. And there it is. The miracles of modern technology. But it still comes down to, sooner or later, somebody's got to play this thing."