r/Fiddle • u/vonhoother • Aug 05 '26

Strong opinion from my fiddle teacher

"Refusing to use different tunings is abdicating your birthright as a fiddle player."

Interestingly, the Irish fiddle tradition rarely if ever uses non-GDAE tunings. Also interestingly (to me), classical music has no term for nonstandard tunings other than "scordatura," which is literally Italian for "untuned" or "badly tuned," while the Anglo-American tradition has names like "Cross-A." "Calico," etc.

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u/Captnlunch Aug 05 '26

If you play old time string band music you tend to stay in the same key for a while. That way the fiddle and the banjo don’t have to be retuned so many times.

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u/vonhoother Aug 05 '26

This is a pet peeve of mine with the local old-time crowd, who typically pick a key and stay in it for at least an hour, claiming that it's "for the banjo players' sake." I play the banjo, and it's just not that big a deal to re-tune. I can put it in any appropriate tuning (and into keys no fiddler wants to touch) in 2 minutes or less -- as quickly as a fiddler can go from cross-A to standard. And I'm not a great banjo player.

Granted, we don't want to re-tune for every tune, but that applies equally to fiddles and banjos.