Thursday, February 07, 2008

Friday is for Funnies

So I think I'm pretty much the best husband in the world. For Christmas I bought my wife a viola. But not only this. Since she hasn't played in years I've been extremely helpful in getting it all set up. Oh yes, it did come with strings on it. But I've helped with things like figuring out how to turn on the tuner and googling what notes the strings are "supposed to be" (CGDA BTW) But thus far I have to say the thing I've been most proud of is that only I, not the accomplished violist, has been able to tune this thing. It's nearly impossible. See Figure "A"

What I'm up against is this. You see that the diameter of the pegs is (sorry for the sideways view) rather large. Additionally, you might have noticed that the pegs are thicker toward the knob getting skinnier as they go in. The idea seems to be you loosen the pegs by pulling them out and tighten them by putting them in. The difficulty is when you turn the peg just 1/100th of a millimeter you drop about four octaves. So literally, I'm skipping back and forth about 3-4 steps and after about ten minutes of trouble I can get the note moderately close. If God's got a sense of humor, he's rolling about now. Because even after two months and a few painfully-close-to being-in-tune practices I finally noticed these little miracles on the other end...

1 comment:

Amy Hatfield said...

A viola is not a guitar, huh?