Do any of you use a chromatic tuner to tune your violin and if so, how does it work for you, and if not, what do you use? Thanks.

vc

I use a cheap chromatic tuner for both violin and cello, works fine.

I use one all the time, I still haven't got my ear tuned-in enough to do it without.

One standard way is to play each adjacent pair of open strings together as a double stop, checking for a true perfect fifth. Ideally this should give you 3:2 perfect fifths, which are approximately two cents sharper than the tempered perfect fifths your electronic tuner will give you, but two cents is approximately the threshold of pitch difference discernement (varying according to range). In other words, an electronic tuner will do in a pinch, but technically the ear is superior.

Don't worry about the technical music jargon. tune your violin in using a tuner (you learn guitar right? your one should do fine) then play the notes and listen to them, this will help get your ear in. you can even do this then listen to the note on a piano and then on your violin. this will teach your ear to tune into the piano. this is important if you are playing with a piano, or elso if one is slightly out of tune it'll sound a bit weird. play the two strings beside each other together. if it sounds bad, its out of tune. if it sounds really nice, its basically in tune. before scotch tells me off, this is clearly not exact tuning. also, your third finger note is equal to the string BELOW it, or the lower sounding one. if the sound matches when you play them together then its in tune. tune to your tuner, then listen to the strings to train yourself. i use a tuner too, because i don't have a piano.

Actually, the original question is ambiguous. There is a clear difference between using an electonic tuner for a reference pitch, the way that an orchestral musician would use the oboe's A, and using it to tune all four strings, on at a time. Using it for a reference pitch is fine; using it for all four strings, one at a time, is a practice that should be discouraged.