On Fri, 18 May 2012 09:05:31 +0100, Invisible wrote:

>> Sounds like it's worn to me.  Peg Dope (which IIRC is the actual
>> product name) is supposed to help with that.
> 
> Possibly doesn't help that I've never tuned a violin in my life.
> 
> Obviously, having your instrument correctly tuned is crucially
> important. So at school, the teacher always did that for us.

Seems like a poor excuse for a teacher, then.  The point of playing in 
school isn't to sound good, but to learn how to play (which includes 
tuning the instrument).

>> Replacing the strings is easy.  I wouldn't pay someone to do it, just
>> buy a set of Dominant or similar and replace them one by one.
> 
> Yeah, I already read that you shouldn't remove all the strings at once.
> I wonder how many other gotchas there are? Apparently it's also fairly
> important to have the strings properly routed through the pegbox... In
> all, I figure I should probably leave this one to the professionals. It
> probably won't even cost that much.

Probably not, if you've never done this before.  But I'm surprised that 
you haven't, as I recall you say you played for years.  But given your 
above comment that you've never tuned a violin before, it seems that your 
self-described "suckiness" at playing is attributable in a HUGE part to 
having a crap teacher who didn't actually teach you anything about 
playing the violin beyond "put your fingers here" and "move the bow like 
this".

Jim

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