Need help choosing; Viola or Violin

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Agreed, 100% I briefly taught violin some years back. You really don't want to mess around with this.

I also have ONE guitar student left from when I used to regularly take guitar students, something I don't do anymore. This kid has one of those mini Squire strats, and he told me one day that he couldn't play it because a string was broken. To avoid having guitars destroyed, I started keeping an extra electric guitar in my studio to let students play since they never brought their own guitars. But I figured the least I could do is give this student a decent restring so I had him bring his guitar in.

First thing I noticed was all the strings were ENTIRELY too tight. By nearly an octave. The neck was bent pretty bad, and the bridge was out of adjustment. I'm extremely meticulous adjusting the bridge on electric guitars, so I recognize it instantly when something isn't my own work. So the next time I saw him I asked him who'd been messing with his guitar--typical story is younger brothers and sisters kill their guitars. He said nobody. So I asked him why the strings were so tight, to which he said that he'd tried to "tune" it. (! !!) Sure, they need to learn to tune their guitars on their own, but that doesn't mean be stupid about it.

Anyway, sans one string, I got the guitar playable again.

There are some BIG differences between guitar and violin-family instruments. The strings are tuned to open 5ths instead of 4ths. On guitar, it's commonplace to detune the guitar DOWN, not up, such as with drop-D or DADGAD. Van Halen actually tunes lower than that, and many of the "big name" players out there tune lower to accommodate heavier-gauge strings (Clapton comes to mind). Personally, I prefer traditional guitar tuning, light strings, and close action for ease of play; but I'm not quite of the caliber guitar player/teacher to play on tight/heavy strings.

On bowed instruments, it isn't unheard of to tune all strings UP a step. Increasing the tension gets a very bright, wiry sound that's perfect for, say, country music or Celtic-style fiddling. There's at least one Romantic-period symphonic work that calls for such a scordatura tuning for exactly that purpose, but I can't think who the composer is or the work. Even with scordatura, all strings are tuned relative to each other in 5ths. You don't really want to tune UP more than that, and if you tune down you're going to jack with the intonation.

Viola goes CGDA. If you were going to go with something resembling guitar tuning, you might try BEAD or DGCF

You're going to find that makes it more difficult to play, though. The reason why Cello, viola, and violin uses perfect 5ths is because scale intervals are close enough together that they are easy to reach. The same intervals on the bass are much further apart, not to mention the string height and tension on the bass is such that the 4th finger is pretty much useless other than to help the 3rd finger.

The other thing is that guitar is a fretted instrument, while the violin class is not. When you play violin/viola, you play scale patterns using all four fingers, whereas on guitar each finger is a half-step apart. The guitar extends its playable range by adding strings. The violin/viola does this by spacing the string tuning slightly further. That gives you a good octave range on just two strings--the first tetrachord on one string and the second tetrachord on the next string. You need three strings on the guitar to do the same thing.

Guitars are tuned in such a way to allow you to play chords, so with classical guitar you can play melody+accompaniment patterns. Bowed instruments are primarily solo instruments. You CAN play chords and you should learn them on violin/viola, but they aren't as "playable" as they are on guitar. You don't want to play these instruments like guitar, anyway, but rather think of them strictly as melodic instruments rather than chordal instruments.

Sure. But if nobody did anything out of the ordinary, ever, we'd be drumming on wooden logs.

Now, before you post away all infuriated and excited, take a deep breath and consider that we've been talking about carefully choosing the weight of the strings in order to maintain the same tension. OK, so if that has actually sunk in, let me add that tinkering and curiosity are natural to aspies - and sometimes, using common sense, it is beneficial to let us tinker a bit.

So while initially I was tending toward cautioning the OP against messing with the viola's tuning, after reading this last post, I realized that I'm actually on the side of experimenting. It may be a failure, or it may be something the OP finds pleasant, interesting and/or useful. It may even start a trend for a completely different style of playing the instrument.

But again, care must be taken in choosing the weight of the strings in order to maintain the same tension as in a standard viola tuning.

I'm not gonna do anything until I can afford any damages, so my future viola is safe for now.

I just didn't want the OP to hamstring his efforts before he even got started. All but one of my students play piano, so teaching violin is no longer a concern of mine. It broke my heart when my last violin student moved away; I stopped teaching violin after that because I have a more experienced violin competitor in town who has a bad habit of taking students on a whim, wasting my time and killing my business only to drop her students a year later--after which they lose interest and never come back to me. I should add that I'm also a synthesist and a sound designer in addition to a composer (which is what I have a master's degree in, right after my bachelor's degree in music education)--so I'm all about microtonal scales and other kinds of experimentation, not to mention all the extended techniques I learned playing microtones, pitch bends, timbre variations, multiphonics, and circular breathing on my major instrument clarinet. I like for my students to be able to do free-form improvisation and play by ear, something traditional piano teachers tend to leave out. Experimenting is fine with me; I enjoy writing orchestra music that uses simple tricks like playing col legno, bowing behind the bridge, and especially sul ponticello. I'm just saying any given instrument setup should maximize the range of techniques available to the player. Tuning a viola in 4ths instead of 5ths when it is unnecessary to do so severely limits the playable range of the instrument in any given position.

I'm all about "out of the ordinary," and I resist "tradition for tradition's sake." But the technique of playing bowed instruments is a long-evolved one, and the kinds of things bowed instruments can do compared to other instruments just leave the rest of us burning with envy (listen to "western" orchestras playing music from India). Standard viola tuning is standard for a reason: It works. I've already mentioned that there ARE certain situations that call for increased string tension, which gives bowed instrument solo and ensemble music a certain "ethnic" sound quality. You might have a legit reason why you WOULD drop a string on a viola same as you would for drop-D guitar tuning--I've personally seen no reason to do this with my own music quite yet.

However, one of the best favors you can do yourself learning any new instrument is make a thorough survey of "typical" playing techniques. I'm learning a new instrument myself, which I enjoy writing for. The sad fact is the instrument I'm learning poses some severe physical limitations that I'm not used to taking into consideration, normally opting to compose more "pianistically" than any other idiom. I'm extending my knowledge and ability of "typical" or "traditional" technique to the most advanced level I can possibly get to in a short period of time before I start trying to make alterations to those techniques--I already have a broad range of skills that I can apply to my playing, but I don't want to risk appearing to resort to cheap gimmicks.

Sounds like you're the one who's mad.


Thank you, Angel, that was an excellent reply.