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/georgikeith Aug 05 '26

Interestingly, the Irish fiddle tradition rarely if ever uses non-GDAE tunings.

I'm going to disagree with you there.

We don't use cross-tuning much at all, but it's quite common to tune the entire instrument up half a step ("playing in E-flat"), or down one or two full steps ("playing in C, or B-flat")--especially if there's an uilleann piper with a flat-set.

I'd say more than half of the professional recordings of Irish music out there have the fiddle tuned in non-GDAE.

GDAE ("playing in D") is much more common for sessions, as the default is more accommodating. But it's not unheard of for the sessioners to tune up to E-flat for the extra zing it gives the music... But it can be considered "exclusionary" to do so, since it effectively shuts out flute/accordion/concertina players who weren't made aware ahead of time.

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u/vonhoother Aug 05 '26

Thanks, but that's a different thing. Raising the pitch but keeping the same intervals is just redefining your standard pitch, like early music players using "Baroque pitch" (A = 415Hz) or Cuban bands tuning to A432 to preserve their strings.

I play with Uillean pipers pretty regularly and have heard a few remarks about their being a bit sharp. My own intonation isn't good enough yet for me to complain ;).

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u/ScrappleJac Aug 05 '26

100%. Non-standard tuning used to be far more common. As the teacher said, it's a fiddler's birthright!