Last night, I was asked to help two children of friends of mine with their new string instruments (one is starting viola, the other violin).
I don’t play either instrument, but I’ve played guitar all my life, and I was mainly enlisted to help them tune the things. Both children will begin receiving classroom instruction shortly.
I was amazed at how hard it was to tune the strings accurately. Which isn’t really a surprise – the simple structure of the pegs (a wood dowel in a hole, kept in place by friction) seems light years behind even low-end guitar tuning pegs. I had to work hard to avoid over-shooting or under-shooting the target pitch.
Their instruments are student models in the $200 range – not Strads, I know. But equivalent-priced guitars have much smoother-action tuning pegs (I know, because I helped pick one out last year for a guy I’m teaching).
My questions, I guess, are:
Are $200 violins and violas really this difficult to tune, or was it my unfamiliarity with them?
2a) If the former, is it less so on higher-quality ones? Or:
2b) If not, why hasn’t the technology been improved?
TIA.
Apologies if this is in the wrong forum – I thought it might alternatively be GQ or IMHO material. Mods, move as you see fit.
Cheap violin → cheap wood, or lesser craftsmanship. The “friction method,” while not exactly high technology, has worked fine for the better part of 350 years. As far as I know, there’s never been a push to change things. The downside is they are susceptible to changes in humidity and temperature, and thus there’s a tendancy for the pegs to be either too tight or too loose. On more expensive instruments, more care is taken to shape the holes and pegs exactly right to each other and the woods resist humidity changes better.
There are steps you can take to loosen up the pegs without upgrading the instrument. You can pull the pegs “out” slightly, because they’re tapered, and they should turn easier. Or, you can rub the pegs with bar soap or pencil lead to reduce the friction, but that requires removing each peg one at a time. Since I just noticed these aren’t your kids or students, I guess you don’t have to worry about any of this!
Often you’ll only find the fine-tuning mechanism on the E string. As for the rest, like the last poster said, just pull out a little and then make sure to push in when you get to it. I find that I can more precisely tune a violin than a guitar, even cheap ones. A cheap tuning peg on a guitar, or a badly wound string, often has little hitches where the pitch will change dramatically no matter how little you turn the peg.
The pegs fitted as standard to any ‘starter’ instrument (or those fitted by a non-specialist music shop) are utterly useless. But as has been pointed out, there should be fine-tuners/adjusters fitted to all four strings. The metal strings which also exist at the bottom end of the price range are virtually untunable on pegs of any kind. Any shop who charged $200 and couldn’t be bothered to fit a full set of adjusters (roughly costing about $5 trade) doesn’t deserve your business in future.
av8rmike identifies the two problems - labour and wood. A good violin has a maple peg-box and ebony pegs. Fitted properly, they work like a dream - there’s no reason to change this technology, because it works so well and so simply. (This is the stage at which an adjuster is only needed on the E, as mentioned by audiobottle - but that’s mainly because the E string being used is still metal, while the others are nylon- or gut-based).
But an unfitted set of good-quality ebony pegs is about $50 for a violin. And far more for a cello. Add to that an hour’s specialist labour fitting them. And then if the peg-box isn’t maple, they still won’t work well.
In addition to the instrument itself, tuning is a skill that improves over time. My cello is good enough that I don’t tend to have problems with the pegs (although I do have fine tuners on all four strings), but even on crappy ones I can usually tune them relatively quickly.
Hah. You have it easy. I have 19 wooden pegs on my instrument. The ones that don’t stick tend to slip. For stickiness, use a touch of soap. For slipping, use rosin.
A tip to avoid overdoing the rosin on slipping pegs, something easily-done and impossible to undo: gently scrape at the block of rosin with a blade, to make some dust. Dab tiny amounts of that dust onto the contact points of the peg, and nowhere else. Keep on trying it in the hole, and dabbing tiny amounts more, until done.
There used to be a guy in San Diego, Fisher was his name I think, who made violins with a sprocket tuning system. They were just like guitar tuners, but mounted horizontally so the pegs stuck out the sides just like any other violin.
These are very good instruments. My sister has one. The pegs work fantastically. No fine tuners needed, of course. For some reason, the D and G had to be wound the opposite direction than normal.
Yuk. The visual aesthetics of such a tuning system on a violin make me shudder.
Besides…as I’ve said, a well-fitted set of traditional pegs works perfectly - it gives a fine-tune capability that is certainly accurate enough for the human ear, and does so very quickly, I suspect as quickly as a sprocket system. And probably costs a similar amount.
Plus, I’d hate to try and change a broken string in a rush on a sprocket system.
No, no. I wish I had a picture. You wouldn’t even notice unless someone ponted it out. It looks completely natural. All the gearage is covered up inside the peg box, leaving only four very neat black wheels. Changing strings is a snap.
This thing is years before its time. An excellent instrument in every regard, too. Probably go for around $20,000 today. You’d just have to see it to understand.
