Tuning your violin is the first thing you do before you play! Here’s a summary of tuning from violinonline.com.
Here are the pitches for each string, so you can tune right now:
You can use your pegs to make larger tuning adjustments.
You can use your fine tuners to make smaller pitch adjustments. Remember, “Righty tighty, lefty loosie.” If you make the string stretched tighter, the pitch will be higher. If you loosen it, the pitch will be lower. So if your string’s pitch is too high, you need to loosen it by turning the tuner to the right. If the pitch is too low, you need to tighten it, by going to the left!
You can tune using a piano (if the piano is in tune!), a tuning fork, or a digital tuner. At my home, we use all 3! We have a Snark brand tuner which is fairly inexpensive.
The strings are each a fifth apart in pitch (d-s interval). So when you memorize that interval in your head, you can learn to tune your violin when you have the pitch for one string, such as the A string. That’s how you use an “A” tuning fork.
Watch how an entire orchestra can tune with the single playing of an A!