I was told that standard fine tuners change the sound of a violin by reducing the string length, and that these can restore the strings back to their “proper” length. So I bought these ingenious little things for all my strings (apart from the E string, which has a loop-end fine tuner that also allows the string to be its proper length). They don’t cost much, and look like good-quality pieces of kit. They are reasonably easy to fix, and they work well as fine tuners. My G string doesn’t actually fit into the hole provided, but then a fine tuner is not really necessary for the G string anyway. There is one thing I am not sure what to make of: these fine tuners hold the ball of the strings a little bit above the tailpiece, which in turn makes the tailpiece sit much closer to the body of the violin than it normally would. I don’t really have any specific reasons for disliking this new geometry, but I would say that while the length of the strings is closer to “proper”, the angle of the tailpiece isn’t. I assume that, for sound purposes, string length is more important than tailpiece angle, and so these fine tuners get the geometry closer to what it should be. Now the key point: do I think that fitting these fine tuners has improved the sound of my violin? The sound of my violin is better now, but sorry, I don’t know whether this is due to the fine tuners as I upgraded my strings at the same time ��
