How To Tune A Cello

Hello, my name is Matthew Forbes from the Music Workshop Company. I'm going to take you through how to tune some instruments, how to play them basically, and also how to read the notated music for them. To tune a cello, we have two things to help us, one are the pegs, and the adjusters, or the fine tuners.

The pegs are there for adjusting the tuning more drastically. So, to go from, to, which is actually the note I want, it's quite a long way. So I use the peg to get as close as I can, and we'll use the fine tuner, just to put the finishing touches to the note.

It's worth saying about the pegs, that they're not cylindrical, they are tapered. So, it's important when you're turning them upwards to imagine you're screwing into the instrument so that it grips. There's nothing that's keeping them there other than friction, there's no mechanical process.

So, it's important to get the grip of the wood on the wood. The adjusters are mechanical, they tend to be metal. And they need to be just screwed to the fingers.

If you're trying to raise the pitch of the note, imagine you're screwing into the string, so clockwise, and if you're making it flatter, to go anti-clockwise, outwards. So that is the mechanics of tuning of the instrument, and now we come to the actual pitches of the four strings and the notes themselves. So, here's how to tune a cello.

The four strings are tuned to A, D, G, and C, starting from the top and going down. The A, is the note a minor third or two white notes on the piano below middle C. Now, if you have a piano, obviously you have the four notes available to you to tune, but firstly, I'm going to show you how to do it the way you only got the one note, the A, because there are times when we have to tune and we don't have a piano particularly but that is the A.

The best thing to do is to sing the note, if you can, whatever your range is, so if you hear that note, sing it here and keep singing it as you play. And you try and get as close to la as you can. And that's just going to put it up very slightly.

That's as close as I can get. So, going down, the strings on the cello, like the violin, are tuned in fifths. So there are five notes of the scale that separate between them.

Going downwards, to the D is the next note down. So if you have a piano it's just A to D. But assuming we don't have one, it's the lower note, if you take that is the do in the do-re-mi scale; do-re-mi-fa-sol.

So, finding it from above, it's just backwards; sol-fa-mi-re-do. And again if you sing the note, do, that's the sound that you expect, do. Ah, rather too sharp.

Sol-fa-mi-re-do. Closer, might have over shot it. Also, cellists and string players generally like to hear the sound of the two stings at the same time.

The purer the sound, the more in tune it's likely to be. For me, the lower string is still a little sharp. That's better.

So, we're going down to the next string down, so it's another fifth, a fifth below D is of course, G. D, C, B, A, and then G. Again on the piano, it's that G there.

But if we were to do it with a voice, again so it's sol-fa-mi-re-do. If you have a higher voice, it's just the octave above, but it should be easily audible. It's a G, is a do.

Sol-fa-mi-re-do. Little flat this time. So.

Sol-fa-mi-re-do, still a little flat. Again, the purity of the interval. Also, the fifth the sol to the do, you can think of it as twinkle twinkle.

It's easier to make the association in your head. Or even the last post. It's a very recognizable sound the fifth.

Happy with that. So, I've got one more string to do. Sol.

Can't quite sing that low so, sol-fa-mi-re-do it's going to be a low C. Sol, sol-fa-mi-re-do. It's a little bit sharp for me.

If we have a piano, it's this low C here. Not sure if that piano is quite in tune but. Not sure if my cello is either.

Sol-fa-mi-re-do, sol-fa-mi-re-do, little sharp. It's very important to hear the sound in your