How to Tune a Violin

The four strings

• G: G3, 196 Hz. Thickest, lowest, usually wound.
• D: D4, 293.66 Hz.
• A: A4, 440 Hz. The reference pitch of Western music, which is why the orchestra tunes to it.
• E: E5, 659.26 Hz. Thinnest, highest, and the one most likely to have a fine tuner if the others do not.

Each string sits a perfect fifth (seven semitones) above the one below. That regularity is the whole design: because every gap is identical, a fingering pattern learned on one string works unchanged on all four, which is not true on a guitar. It also means the violin family shares its logic. Viola and cello are tuned C G D A, the same run of fifths starting a fifth lower; a double bass breaks the pattern and uses fourths.

Pegs and fine tuners: which one, and when

This is the part that beginners get wrong and that damages instruments.

• Fine tuners (the small metal screws at the tailpiece) move the pitch by a few cents per turn. This is the right tool for daily tuning, where you are correcting drift, not making a change. Clockwise raises, anticlockwise lowers.
• Pegs (in the scroll) move the pitch enormously for a small turn. Use them when a string is a semitone or more out, when a fine tuner has run out of travel, or after restringing. Never force a fine tuner that has bottomed out; back it off to the middle of its range and correct with the peg instead.

The peg technique matters more than the peg direction. A violin peg is a tapered wooden cone held by friction in a tapered hole. There is no gear and no lock. You must push the peginto the pegbox while you turn it, and keep pushing as you stop. Turn without pushing and the string will drop the moment you let go. Support the scroll with your other hand, work in tiny movements, and expect to overshoot at first.

Pegs that slip constantly, or that stick and then jump, are usually a weather problem: wood swells and shrinks with humidity. Peg compound from a violin shop, applied sparingly, fixes both directions. If a peg keeps slipping, rubbing a tiny bit of chalk onto the contact points adds immediate friction to hold it in place.

Tuning it, step by step

1. Tune the A string first. Everything else is measured from it. Use a tuner, a piano, a tuning fork, or a drone. In an ensemble, the A comes from the oboe or the leader, not from your own device: the goal is agreeing with everyone else, not being objectively correct.
2. Bow steadily while you adjust. Short scrapes give a tuner nothing to read and give your ear nothing to judge. A long, even bow stroke at moderate pressure produces a stable pitch; a heavy stroke actually pulls the pitch slightly and will lie to you.
3. Then D, then G, then E, each against its neighbour or against the tuner.
4. Go round again. The four strings share one bridge and one top plate, so tightening one changes the others. Two passes minimum.
5. Check the bridge is still upright. Tuning drags the bridge forward toward the fingerboard over time. It should stand at a right angle to the top, with its feet flat. A leaning bridge will eventually warp or fall, and it changes your string heights while it leans.

Tuning by ear, in fifths

This is the traditional method and it is worth learning, because it trains the interval that the entire instrument is built on.

Bow two adjacent strings together (A and D, say) and listen. When the fifth is not quite right you hear a slow pulsing in the sound, a wobble, called beating. It is caused by the two pitches interfering with each other, and it slows down as the interval gets closer to pure. When the wobble disappears entirely, the fifth is in tune.

The important part: do not try to judge whether one string is high or low. Just listen to the speed of the wobble and move in whichever direction slows it. Your ear is extremely good at detecting a pulse vanishing and quite bad at ranking two similar pitches.

One subtlety worth knowing. Tuned in pure fifths, a violin ends up very slightly wider than equal temperament across all four strings, which is why an ear-tuned violin's bottom G can read a few cents flat on a tuner while sounding perfect. Orchestral players live with this; pianists cannot, which is why the piano tunes flat fifths and the string section quietly compromises when playing with one. If you want to hear what that compromise sounds like, practicing against a drone is the fastest way in.

The A you tune to is not always 440

Most of the time it is. But many European orchestras tune to 442 or 443 Hz for a slightly brighter sound, and period-instrument ensembles playing baroque repertoire commonly use 415 Hz , almost exactly a semitone below modern pitch. If you are joining an ensemble, ask what they tune to before you arrive. If you are playing along to a recording that feels stubbornly out despite everything reading green, the recording is probably not at 440. There is more on this in what your tuner's reference setting does.

Tuning is the first ear-training exercise of the day

On a fretless instrument, every note you play is a tuning decision, so the two minutes spent matching fifths at the start of a session are not overhead: they are the warm-up for the listening you are about to do for the next hour. Do it by ear when you have time, with a tuner when you do not, and check the tuning again after twenty minutes.

Full string references for violin, viola, cello, bass and twenty-odd other instruments, with note, octave and frequency, are in the tuning reference.