There are several related topics in the archives. Essentially, can-o-worms.

Tuning/intonation is a tricky business. I leave the tuner on at least half the time I’m playing, even though I suppose I wish I didn’t. I’ve got to the point, (in the limited number of keys in which I play) where, according to my tuner, I seem to be playing in tune. However, I often times don’t sound quite as sweetly as I want to which I attribute to the fact that I’m not as in tune as the tuner tells me I am. I also am listening for the ring of open strings, but find that some of them like the G string for instance ,are hard to hear at times.

Tuners are tools that can be used to check a pitch based on frequency. Some tuners can be selected for equal temperament or just tuning. If you use a typical tuner to spot check notes while you practice, the tuner will get you in the vicinity of the pitch, although it won’t necessarily get you in tune.

I don’t recommend watching a tuner as you play because it’s a distraction from what’s most important: using the ear to find pitch. If you’re playing with other musicians, you need to be listening to them to be in sync with them. If you’re playing so that the light is green all the time (which isn’t realistic anyway), you probably won’t be in harmony with the other players.

If you play with a piano, you have to adjust to the intonation of the piano if you want to be in tune with it. That means adjusting the violin’s tuning so that the fifths are no longer all perfect because the piano isn’t in just tuning and your double stops or chords may clash with the piano’s if your violin is in tune with itself. If you’re playing with other instruments, you may need to be listening to them to match pitches as well to avoid beating.

The accuracy of tuners is not always trustworthy—some are accurate and others can have discrepancies. They’re tools for getting an open string to a particular frequency, not so much for onboard monitoring as you’re playing.

I use the tuner only for tuning. I've tried once or twice keeping it on while playing, but found it just one more distraction. If something sounds off to me, I might check my tuning with the tuner. If I just want to know how my intonation is generally, I'll record myself, and listen to the playback. If it sounds the way I want it to sound, I'm happy. I've noticed, with age, though, a bit of a tendency to play sharp on the E string - I don't hear it while I'm playing, but I do when I listen to something I've recorded. When I was young, I would hear old fiddlers playing like that, and I always wondered if they were hearing what I was hearing.

As for initial tuning - I'll tune to the tuner, then play the open strings together, and tweak my tuning if something doesn't sound the way I want it.

Yes, I agree with both of you. I should say I do occasionally record and listen - I’m not horribly off, though at times not perfect. This tuner thing is a strong compulsion from which I need to break.

I tune the A to 440hz, then the D to the A, and the E to the A. Get used to hearing that ring of the perfect 5ths.

Now, in loud stage conditions, tune as above before it gets loud. Then see what the digital tuner indicates. Remember the D, G, and E won't be dead-on but a few cents off. Remember this and tune that way. (Hard to explain)

Like Rich says, most acoustic pianos are not it tune to anything but themselves.
Fortunately, most folks use stage pianos that are perfectly regulated. But remember, that black piano key replaces two keys/tones, depending on the tonic center(key). That actually is a quick way to explain differences in temperament.

I have a tuner app called Gstrings tuner on my phone and tablet, which I like a lot. It offers a lot of different instruments and temperaments, including perfect fifths for violin. I've never used any tuner while playing though.
A physical tuner in 12t equal temperament can still be useful for tuning the open strings, if it can give even a suggestion of how many cents sharp or flat a note is. A perfect fifth is just about 2 cents wider than the equal tempered version. So if you tune your A string to 440 Hz, you would tune your D string about 2 cents flat on the tuner. The G string should be another 2 cents flat, for a total of 4 cents relative to the A string. Likewise, the E string should be about 2 cents sharp. This approximates perfect fifths, and may help you to play more in tune.
Checking that F# in your example is a little trickier, depending on how its used musically. If its the third in the key of D, "in tune" on the tuner will be noticeably sharp, because a major third in equal temperament is almost 15 cents sharper than the just interval. So if you play the F# 15 cents or so flat to the tuner it might sound sweeter to you.
You can find charts online that show how the intervals compare between just intonation and 12t equal temperament - it varies with the interval.
PS - I see farmerjones hinted at the same idea about tuning to a tuner.

The only tuning to consider is the 4 open strings. Some, including me, favor tuning them to equal temperament as the best average, and to match pianos, guitars, etc. The other ways is to tune those strings to perfect 5ths, and many players do that for the great sound of perfect 5ths on the open strings. The other thing to understand is that just intonation only works in a given key. Your fingers will be, and should be, notating intervals for the key you are in, something you do with your ears, like singers do.

One more consideration - A 440 is the frequency you must start with for violin just tuning, which matches the piano and is standard. If you start with the piano's G, D, or E the results will be different.

I use a Peterson strobe type tuner. It has a violin selection. What I have noticed is that if i get the strings all tuned so the strobe bars stop moving but let the open string continue to sound, often the tuner will show the 'after ring' if you will, goes flat. The tinyest bit of adjustment brings that also into tune and now the fiddle is really in tune and ready to be played. I often wonder if simpler tuners or cheaper ones are sensitive enough for this.

I also think the ear is the best tuner. Once my fiddle is tuned up (as above), my ear tells me when I'm in tune both with myself and with the other instruments. When we record, If I put down a fiddle track first, almost always it is just used as a guide for the other tracks and needs to be re-recorded once more instruments are laid down.

I may not be as erudite as some in expressing the percents, but this seems to work for me. When I listen back to recordings, sound is OK by me. WHat do you guys think? Some recordings in my media files for examples.

When you tune a violin in perfect fifths, you’re tuning the open strings as reference, but in so doing, you’re also setting the intonation for fingered parallel fifths. If you’re playing in equal temperament, that means that your double stops will beat unless you’re readjusting your fingers as you play to close the gaps. When it’s a parallel fifth, you don’t have much room to fix it.

Players are very sensitive to the purity of fifths, and they will notice it right away if a fingerboard or nut aren’t shaped properly, causing fifths to be out of tune.

I think it’s a bit misleading to argue that just intonation only works in one key, especially given that the violin can be played in any key without retuning. It is true that just intonation has limitations, and that the farther you depart from a home key, the more you start to see the Pythagorean comma throw things off. But key changes are not impossible in just intonation if they aren’t far away.

When I was in college, one of the tutors demonstrated the difference in tuning systems by playing selections from Bach’s Well-Tempered Klavier. We had a harpsichord in the music library that had pedals you could push to alter the tuning. You could play in just intonation and then switch to equal temperament by pushing a different pedal. It could be demonstrated that some keys worked well and the chords were much more harmonious, but if you departed too much, things started to clash. The use of equal temperament is a way of splitting up the Pythagorean comma and distributing it along the scale so that it reduces beating overall along a wide range of keys. This also means making lots of intervals slightly out of tune. Because the pieces of the comma are small, it’s enough to make it tolerable to listen to music in many keys without retuning a keyboard instrument. However, the harmonic purity of just intonation when compared is quite compelling.

quote:

---

Originally posted by The Violin Beautiful

When you tune a violin in perfect fifths, you’re tuning the open strings as reference, but in so doing, you’re also setting the intonation for fingered parallel fifths. If you’re playing in equal temperament, that means that your double stops will beat unless you’re readjusting your fingers as you play to close the gaps. When it’s a parallel fifth, you don’t have much room to fix it.

 

---

The point about there only being the 4 notes in just intonation is that, except for your comment about parallel 5ths, it's not very important. Those 4 notes are in just intonation in the key of A, but adjusted for equal temperament they are still parallel 5ths up the neck. The finger adjustment to make parallel 5ths pure is very subtle, subtle enough that I doubt the average player achieves it automatically by just laying down a fleshy finger anyway. But it doesn't hurt to start there, of course. I don't disagree with anything you say. I just find it a fairly pointless distinction for violin. (Yet I always get pulled into the discussion).

quote:

---

Originally posted by Brian Wood

quote:

---

Originally posted by The Violin Beautiful

When you tune a violin in perfect fifths, you’re tuning the open strings as reference, but in so doing, you’re also setting the intonation for fingered parallel fifths. If you’re playing in equal temperament, that means that your double stops will beat unless you’re readjusting your fingers as you play to close the gaps. When it’s a parallel fifth, you don’t have much room to fix it.

 

---

The point about there only being the 4 notes in just intonation is that, except for your comment about parallel 5ths, it's not very important. Those 4 notes are in just intonation in the key of A, but adjusted for equal temperament they are still parallel 5ths up the neck. The finger adjustment to make parallel 5ths pure is very subtle, subtle enough that I doubt the average player achieves it automatically by just laying down a fleshy finger anyway. But it doesn't hurt to start there, of course. I don't disagree with anything you say. I just find it a fairly pointless distinction for violin. (Yet I always get pulled into the discussion).

---

I don't think it's quite so trivial a distinction. A lot of people say that they find it very hard to listen to piano music because of equal temperament. I've also heard people who have perfect pitch (not those who pretend to have it) often find listening to orchestral music very jarring because of pitch variation. 

In jams I see a lot of fiddlers use clip-on tuners to tune all four strings before playing, and while it gets their violins into pitch according to the tuner (assuming they use the tuner correctly), their violins aren't quite in tune, and as soon as they play drones with an open string or play two open strings at once, there's a lot of squawking. Even without a second note played against it, the pitch variation can really stick out over the course of a melody. It can be very distracting when a player is off by even a small amount, and it can really stick out in an unpleasant way if you're in the middle of the group. 
 

Tuning by fifths gets the violin to a place where it sounds harmonious. It's not just about individual notes or chords, either. The violin is a while vibrating system that works best when everything is in alignment. Strings are carefully designed for a specific vibrating length to get the best sound possible out of them, and the instrument itself is similarly designed to promote frequencies that are important. This is what separates many excellent violins from mediocre ones--a great violin will give you the feeling that it's got unlimited power because it sings and promotes overtones you don't hear with a bad instrument. If you're not tuning the violin carefully, you're losing out on the tonal benefits of it being in phase and the overtones it can produce. Players often describe how a good old violin "wants" to be played in tune and how it will rebel if your intonation isn't accurate enough. This is why some great violins are not easy to play--they don't forgive you for missing notes. It's also why a bad player can play a great violin and decide that it's not so great--it can't perform well if you don't know what to do with it. 

Many guitar players will tune with a tuner to get each open string to an equal tempered pitch, but will then adjust by playing each string against the same pitch on a lower string.

Music has been described as mathematics in motion, and I think that is a very apt description. You can make a scale using pure mathematical ratios to set the position for frets on a simple monochord (of course you're confronted by the comma eventually).

Nowadays, music is being adjusted by auto-tune software to fit to equal temperament whenever there's variation. That should theoretically make the music more pleasant if it solves intonation problems, but instead it makes music sound lifeless and mechanical. I've heard selections of recordings made by professional musicians run through autotune software, and the change is anything but trivial. Yes, it can help a singer with a tin ear sound better, but it doesn't make a singer sound like a good singer. 

In my world human ears are pretty forgiving. Piano music can be beautiful, likewise fiddles tuned to equal temperament. Human voices auto-tuned on the other hand, is an abomination, period. I have different expectations for sound than clinical perfection.

I suspect a lot of this discussion is based on intellectual conceit of some kind, and less on actual aural experience.

Music consists of different tonalities, and micro tonal intervals that give it life. Nothing is perfect apart from beautiful imperfection.

FIddlers have the ability to deliberately “shade” the pitch or slide into it, and that’s part of the beauty and style of somebody’s fiddling. I think that in music, ears have to come before math…(and most average listeners are not gifted with perfect pitch)…

quote:

---

Originally posted by NCnotes

FIddlers have the ability to deliberately “shade” the pitch or slide into it, and that’s part of the beauty and style of somebody’s fiddling. I think that in music, ears have to come before math…(and most average listeners are not gifted with perfect pitch)…

---

It can be argued that perfect pitch is not a gift at all, but a curse and a distraction for one's brain while assimilating a multitude of changing frequencies called music. The only thing I can think that perfect pitch is good for, besides bragging rights, is if no one brought a tuner to a jam. Good relative pitch is very valuable.

Yeah, I knew a fiddler with perfect pitch. He had to re-tune for every song. Then he'd tell his guitar player how far off he was. Yeah, he was a real JOY.

I don’t think perfect pitch is necessarily a wonderful gift, either. I agree that good relative pitch is very helpful. It’s nice to be able to tune a violin without needing a tuner as a crutch. But it’s the playing that matters, anyway.

My father had a friend in music school who had perfect pitch. If you played a random group of notes on a piano at the same time, he could instantaneously identify them all and replay the chord for you. He also had an amazing recall for numbers, and had memorized pi to a world record length just as something entertaining to do (he couldn’t be bothered to apply to take the record). As impressive as these feats were, he viewed them as parlor tricks and didn’t consider them an advantage in playing music.

But the difference between just intonation and equal temperament is not something that requires perfect pitch to discern. That difference may not be as noticeable among fiddlers who don’t play in tune according to any tuning system, but a decent ear can pick up on it if the playing is in tune. As a friend of mine likes to say, “Play for the best ear in the room—even if that means it’s your ear.”

Just remember that for just intonation accurate pitch is a moving target.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Brian Wood

Just remember that for just intonation accurate pitch is a moving target.

---

I suppose I'd agree in the sense that modulating to different keys would require adjustment to a fixed instrument like a piano, but I don't agree that it's a moving target in the sense that the intervals are mathematically and tonally pure. You might have to adjust in different keys, but the ratios remain constant--a fifth is always the same relation to the fundamental.

I think the ability to hear this is the reason that it's possible to play unfretted string instruments in tune--the physical spacing of intervals becomes smaller as you go up the fingerboard (fifths aren't all the same size on a ruler), but the ear can recognize the mathematical value intuitively to reach the correct pitch. 

It's the mathematical value of relative pitches that matters, not the consonance of perfect 5ths in narrowing physical space as you go up the neck. It's not just modulating to different keys, mismatched intervals start happening subtly as you change chords within a key. The more complex the music becomes harmonically the more intervals must be chosen for their immediate consonance. In that sense, playing a fixed interval instrument tuned to just intonation is still an approximation of accuracy once harmonic relationships, chords or melodic complexity, are considered. Playing a non-fixed instrument or singing allows the the closest approximation of accuracy at any given moment in the music. A violin has 4 fixed notes, so singing, with no fixed root note, is the more adaptable.

Here is some more info on intonation for consideration:

stringsmagazine.com/dynamic-in...ystified/

I think Hadelich sums it up well:

“This sounds incredibly theoretical and complicated—it isn’t actually,” he says. “This is what sounds best, and you can also arrive at this kind of tuning purely by using your ear, without all the analysis.”

I've probably posted this a couple times before, but in live situations I've found that it's best to determine where the consensus is among your fellow players in terms of pitch and try to blend in. Naturally, being in tempo with your fellow players can be pretty vital, too.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Lonesome Fiddler

I've probably posted this a couple times before, but in live situations I've found that it's best to determine where the consensus is among your fellow players in terms of pitch and try to blend in. Naturally, being in tempo with your fellow players can be pretty vital, too.

---

It's funny you should mention that. A friend was recently telling me that a number of the players he listens to or takes lessons from have said that they won't play in sessions anymore because they find that doing so is harmful to their technique and intonation. Since they want to blend into the sound of the group (unless they're leading and setting the tone), they describe being pulled out of tune by other players and developing bad playing habits that they have to spend extra time to undo.

I suspect the makeup of the group has a lot to do with it. If you're in a group where the players are rather good, you can learn a lot and improve, but the opposite can sometimes be true as well. 
 

I do agree that you should pay attention to phrasing and rhythm for playing in a group, but I'm not so sure I'd endorse playing out of tune unless it's an emergency situation.