Maybe but I'm not convinced of your conclusion. Truth is, the pitch via a tuner is slightly different when plucked vs bowed. What you've described from lifting is essentially the same as the plucked tone. Try that (pluck vs bow) and see if it doesn't pan out that way.

Okay, tuned at 440 like usual the all the plucked strings do give a steady ringing sound, with even pitch, same as when tuned to 432.
I've been tuning back and forth and experimenting but I'm probably asking too much from a tuner.
Maybe its me. That would make sense too.

Is this a thing? Are there 440 Hz vs 432 Hz violins?

Nope.

As Billy mentioned, it's normal for bowed note to be sharper than a plucked note, for a few reasons. Some tuners will show that difference more than others. The difference is generally negligible, maybe a few cents, but bow pressure, strings can affect the variance.

440 Hz is the standard tuning but 432 has had a history and its advocates.

You can tune your fiddle to any reference you want; but the 432 Hz thing is a rather modern woo pseudoscience thing.

I tuned my fiddle to 432hz =A. Then I went to the digital piano. Assuming default is 440hz=A. I thought I had a pretty good ear. Not perfect pitch, but fair relative pitch. I couldn't tell. IOW, the fiddle sounded in tune with the piano, to me.
OK, who can hear the difference?

Hmm They say that the pitch of A has crept up over the years, and at the time older violins were made, A was lower in pitch and those violins are optimized for that…
On my 100yr+ violin I love tuning down, it sounds so good!!

But to play in a group, I have to go back to the 440…(or, most common is to tune to the accordion player.)

Also, that is interesting about plucked vs bowed with the tuner! I have never tried tuning with plucking ( except with my guitar of course :-)

Think this is irritating? How about trying to play with Highland bagpipes, which are nominally tuned to Bd which USED to be A and even nowadays, they run sharper then Bd, so using a tuner is useless. At least my smallpipes are tuned to A 440 (kinda).

Whoops! I lied!
My intellitouch tuner can be set to 438-440-442. I set it to 438.
C'mon, who can hear a delta of 2hz. (By itself)?

The history of 432 is not really that long. There are not violins intended for 432 instead of 440, just as baroque violins that are sometimes played at 415 are not made for that pitch. Plate tuners do pay attention to frequency, but it’s not 440. A normal plate’s frequency will not be at that pitch. While the violin makers of the golden era clearly paid attention to plate thickness, there is no direct evidence that they tuned plates.

Pitch was not standardized for the first few centuries of the violin’s existence. There was no standard for baroque pitch, and tuning usually varied by region, often dictated by church organs. As a result, some pitches were lower but some were actually higher than 440. For the sake of simplicity and to avoid having to retune as much, modern baroque players widely adopted 415 with the acknowledgment that it was an anachronistic compromise.

There is indeed a trend of rising pitch for A, with some orchestras using 442 or higher for a brighter, crisper sound. The standard is still 440 for now.

I have come across players who have violins they like better at a lower pitch, but that is a matter of personal preference or setup.

The frequency for A is much more important to strings, as they are carefully designed to perform their best at target frequencies. That doesn’t mean you can’t retune the strings, just that there is a compromise if you do.

One thing i know about fiddling, is that aren't any baton banging pedagogues telling you what they think is in or out of tune. The fiddle is YOUR voice use it how you like. Personally i think the skeleton of a tune sounds ok to me, if i get the notes of the Pentatonic scale in tune as much as possible, and treat any other notes in the tune as flat or sharp of those...How flat or sharp is up to you imo.

A lot of fiddles ring better at a semitone below 440Hz  in my experience. But that also applies to temperature, and a multitude of other factors also.

I know some guitar players who use 432 and swear by it.. To me it would not be a problem retuning EXCEPT all playing together would have to agree to that.  As for tuning a violin lower that 440..My fiddles all sound better (solo) a 5th lower!!! 

A 5th would be far to slack for me, but if it works for you.....A D tune would be an A tune, and a G tune would be a D tune?

Dont get the 432 thing... Sounds like woo woo to me.

quote:

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Originally posted by pete_fiddle

A 5th would be far to slack for me, but if it works for you.....A D tune would be an A tune, and a G tune would be a D tune?

Dont get the 432 thing... Sounds like woo woo to me.

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 Sorry... I didn't mean a whole 5th.......We used to regularly tune to GDgd and play A tunes that way.. Lots of fun.  FCfc is also nice ...

Pete - "woo woo" - made me snort out the afternoon tea.

I dunno guys, I worked too hard to acclimate the ear to hear intonation issues to start messing around with A-438, A-432 or A-442. A - fo fo teee fo meee!

Hope there was no rum in it

I like mine about half a step down, or a whole step down...
it sounds so mellow and resonant that way...
I first tuned it that way to play along with some old recordings of John Kelly.
Those old fiddlers played in tune, but their fiddles were rarely at today's A!
And I just love the sound...
every once in a while I tune down and play that way for a few days!

I wish there would be the trend of falling A...why does it always have to trend up!

I'm pretty sure the reason fiddles ring more or whatever at a lower pitch is because the strings are that much slacker, less tension.


Michael Ray, you have to compare the pitch as you bow it to the pitch you get when you pluck it (use a tuner for this), not just pluck the strings to hear it steadily ringing. You'll see they are not the same pitches, it's a slight difference that a good ear can pick out. You seem to have a sensitive enough ear to have heard it already in your example above.

The string vibrates in a much more complex way when it’s bowed, so it helps to tune with the bow to get an accurate pitch.

Pitch has always been very interesting to me...I love the tales (true or not...I mean, who was there to witness?) of Pythagoras messin' with vibrating strings and dividing them up mathematically to discover the overtone series...which, well that's proven scientific fact and too much for me to describe...just walk over to any piano you see anywhere laying around (lol) and hold the sustain pedal down and hit all the C's your fingers can manage and listen good and you'll be able to sort out many of the overtone series tones once you get your ears to try to ignore the perfect intervals that are so prevalent. Anyway, there's some math there discovered by Pythagoras, supposedly him...and it's just amazing to me. Supposedly, Pythagoras noted similarities in nature associated with the specific overtone series of certain tones. If there's anything too that...or whether it is just folklore and pseudoscience, it seems amazing to me and ... oh well I can't write anymore right now...too much going on here all the time.

Anyway, you get my gist...I do notice so many differences in tuning by ear, how you attack the string on any instrument, whether it is a lower pitch or higher... all makes a difference...all amazing territory to explore...and I gotta run

quote:

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Originally posted by The Violin Beautiful

The string vibrates in a much more complex way when it’s bowed, so it helps to tune with the bow to get an accurate pitch.

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Ahhhhhhhh. Hmmmmm

quote:

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Originally posted by The Violin Beautiful

The string vibrates in a much more complex way when it’s bowed, so it helps to tune with the bow to get an accurate pitch.

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I tune with a d'Addario clip-on tuner (not trying to revive that argument) and there's a tiny range where the green light shows, from ever-so-slightly flat to ever-so-slightly sharp. These tuners are good and consistent so that I have learned to pluck tune just on the flat side in the green. It sounds harder than it is. It's easier for me than tuning while bowing, with the same result.

For many years I tuned to a 440 A tuning fork that I purchased endless years ago at a music store. More recently I've been tuning to a 440 A tone furnished by my battery-powered Seiko metronome. Are the two frequencies slightly different? I've never been nuts enough to compare them. Finally, yeah, I'll reiterate that when I play in live situations, I let the devil take the hindmost and tune to wherever the Jam Leader/Alpha Dog happens to be stationed.

quote:

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Originally posted by Lonesome Fiddler

For many years I tuned to a 440 A tuning fork that I purchased endless years ago at a music store. More recently I've been tuning to a 440 A tone furnished by my battery-powered Seiko metronome. Are the two frequencies slightly different? I've never been nuts enough to compare them. Finally, yeah, I'll reiterate that when I play in live situations, I let the devil take the hindmost and tune to wherever the Jam Leader/Alpha Dog happens to be stationed.

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My father told me about a professor he knew in music school who was extremely sensitive to pitch. He always carried a tuning fork in his pocket but ground the ends to adjust tuning to account for variation caused by his body heat.

I've never been quite that exacting, although it does often occur to me to question just how accurate different tuners and tone generators really are. I've encountered some that were at odds, which was easily demonstrated by turning them on simultaneously.

I agree that in a group setting it's best to tune to the leader. The instruments need to be in tune with each other even more than they need to be tuned to a specific frequency. If one player is off it sticks out like a sore thumb. 

Not really about the 432 vs 440 thing, but about tuning and strings - different kinds of strings react differently to bowing, if you press hard with your bow on steel strings they can go up quite a bit in pitch!