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I'm beginner in the violin and while tuning the E string using a chromatic tuner I've noticed it has two different tuned spots. One is kind loosely producing an squeaky sound and another one is tighter which produce a high pitch sound that is almost disturbing.

As a novice player and autodidact (I live in a small city in Brazil and there are no violin teachers here) I wonder which one of them is correct?

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  • Hello. Could you make a good quality recording of your violin empty strings in both tunings of E, so that we can see (hear) what's actually going on?
    – yo'
    Jan 17, 2015 at 20:15
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    Pretty sure it's the higher one. I don't think you can possibly have tuned the e-string one octave too high, it would break either the string or the violin...
    – leftaroundabout
    Jan 17, 2015 at 21:51
  • It's a common phenomenon for an E-string to accidentally 'squeak' (hit a harmonic), although it usually only does so for a brief moment or two. Try playing smoothly as possible. You might want to get it looked at if it does it a lot. youtube.com/watch?v=WGRgMMdz4Ew
    – dwn
    Jan 18, 2015 at 13:50

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You're E string should be tuned to E5 which is 659.3Hz.

Here's a video that plays each open string for you. Tune your violin to sound like it.

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  • And once you've got that right, acquaint yourself to the sound of fifths that each pair of neighbouring strings should produce. (Incidentally, those are just fifths, so the e is actually 660 Hz rather than 659.3, unless you want a meantone tuning.)
    – leftaroundabout
    Jan 17, 2015 at 21:47
  • The G on the video sounds slightly sharp to me
    – Matthew Barclay
    Nov 5, 2018 at 0:44
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You can use mobile apps tuner to tune. I am a self-starter too. I use Super tuner android app for both of my violins and it works pretty good for me. It just needs a very quiet place to tune as it cant feel any vibration and work only by listening to the sound using microphone. There is an instrument choose option and you can choose violin. It automatically detects which string you are playing and shows the frequency. Or you can just the listen to the sound of each string and tune by ear.

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