The note lasts as long as you hold it
Press a string above and keep pressing. It keeps sounding. Let go and it stops, leaving only the short ring of the body, the way it does when a bow leaves a string.
That sentence is the whole page, and it is worth saying plainly why, because it sounds like a small thing. Every other instrument you can play on this site — and every other virtual violin we could find anywhere — is an instrument you trigger. You hit a tine, or a string, or a pad; the note is now out of your hands and decays on a schedule the object decides. That is completely correct for a kalimba, and it is completely wrong for a violin. A bowed string is not struck and released. It is driven: the bow keeps feeding energy in, the string never decays while the hair is on it, and the note ends when the player decides it ends.
A virtual violin built out of recorded notes cannot do this, and it is not a matter of sample quality. A recording has a length in it already. Hand somebody a two-second note and they can play you a piece made of two-second notes; they cannot play you a phrase, because a phrase is made of notes whose lengths were chosen while they were sounding. This page synthesises the string instead — so the length is yours, and so is everything that happens during it.
There are no frets, and that is the difficulty
The pitch is wherever your finger is. Not the nearest marker, not the nearest semitone — the actual position, read to the cent and printed under the instrument. Slide, and it follows continuously.
This is the reason the violin takes as long as it does to learn. A guitarist who puts a finger in roughly the right place gets exactly the right note, because a fret decided it in advance. A violinist who puts a finger in roughly the right place gets a note that is roughly right, which is to say wrong, and the ear has to close the gap every single time. There is no version of this instrument in which that is not true, so there is no honest version of this page in which the pitch snaps to a grid.
The markers are there to remind you where a pitch is, the way the tapes on a beginner’s fingerboard do. They decide nothing. Watch the readout under the neck while you move: if it says +18¢ you are eighteen cents sharp, which on a violin is not a rounding error but the difference between an in-tune third and a sour one.
Positions, and why the gaps between them are uneven
A violinist does not think in semitones. The hand sits in a position, the four fingers cover a range from there, and moving to another position is a deliberate act called a shift. The markers labelled 1 to 7 above are where the first finger goes in each one.
The numbering follows one rule: the position is named for which degree of the open string’s own major scale the first finger lands on. First position puts it on the second degree, third position on the fourth, fifth position on the sixth. On the A string that is B, then D, then F♯. Because a major scale is not a chromatic one, the gaps are uneven — a whole tone from first to second position, then only a semitone from second to third — and that unevenness is a real thing a beginner has to absorb rather than an artefact of the drawing.
Second position is drawn as a band rather than a line, and that is deliberate. There is a low second and a high second, a semitone apart, and both are standard: flat keys want the low one, sharp keys the high one. A fret would have to choose and would then be wrong half the time. A marker can honestly say “somewhere in here, and it depends on the key”, which is what a teacher would say.
Half position — first finger a single semitone above the open string — is marked more faintly, because it is a real place the hand goes and leaving it out would imply the hand jumps straight from the nut to a whole tone up.
Notice that the markers crowd together as they climb. That is not a drawing decision: stopping a string exactly halfway along its length sounds the octave, a third of the way along sounds the fifth above the open note, and every interval above that is squeezed into what remains. The top of the drawn neck is the octave, which on a real violin is roughly where the fingerboard meets the body and where the hand stops being able to go further without leaving the neck behind.
Vibrato arrives late, on purpose
Hold a note for a second and listen to it settle. It does not start vibrating; it speaks first, plainly, and the vibrato widens in a moment later. That is what a left hand does — the finger lands, the note is found, and only then does the hand start rocking.
It is also why sampled violins so often sound wrong in slow music. A sample with vibrato baked in from the first millisecond has it on every note, including the short ones that would never get it, and the ear notices without being able to say why. Here the delay does the sorting by itself: quick notes come out plain because they are over before the vibrato arrives, and held notes warm up because they are not.
Violin vibrato is also narrower than most people expect — about a fifth of a semitone either way, heard as warmth rather than as the pitch moving. A wide one is the fastest way to make a synthesised string sound artificial. Switch it off with the Vibrato toggle if you are hunting for where a note is; it is exactly the thing that makes that harder.
Pizzicato is the same instrument
Switch to Pizzicato and the strings are plucked with a finger instead of bowed. Two things change and one does not.
What changes: the note now stops on its own, so holding a string does nothing — a plucked note is one you have already made, not one you are still making. And it is short. A pizzicato open G rings for a second or so and a pizzicato E is almost a click, because a violin has a tiny body and very short strings under high tension and nothing to sustain a pluck with.
What does not change is the instrument. The pluck runs through the same body resonances the bowed note does, because on a real violin it is the same box — which is why pizzicato sounds like a violin being plucked rather than like a small harp. Violinists switch to it mid-phrase and back, and it is worth doing that here once just to hear that the room does not change with it.
Four tunings, and three of them are fiddle tunings
The default is G–D–A–E, perfect fifths all the way up, which is what essentially every violin on earth is tuned to. The other three are scordatura — deliberate retunings — and they are here because the violin and the fiddle are the same object used by two traditions, and one of them retunes constantly. The chips name them the way old-time players do: the four open strings, low to high.
- AEAE is the classic old-time cross tuning. Every open string belongs to the A chord, so the drones never stop and the instrument does half the accompaniment by itself.
- ADAE — “high bass” — moves only the bottom string, up a whole tone. Everything you know on the other three still works, which is what makes it the gentlest way into cross-tuning.
- GDGD is the same idea a fifth lower and darker. Note that this one lowers the top two strings rather than raising anything, which is easier on the strings and on the instrument.
These are not transpositions of each other and fingerings do not carry between them: a shape that crosses a pair of strings tuned a fourth apart instead of a fifth moves by a different interval. That is the point of doing it. The same three are listed on the violin tuner, so you can put a real instrument into one and then come back here.
What the sound is made of
Nothing here is a recording. The note is built while you play it, and it is built out of what a bowed violin physically is — which is worth describing, partly because it is interesting and partly because it is the honest way to say which parts are modelled and which are not.
A bowed string does not vibrate like a plucked one. It sticks to the bow hair, is dragged sideways, slips back, and is caught again — hundreds of times a second — and what results is a single corner travelling round and round the string. The force that corner puts on the bridge, which is the entire signal the instrument’s body ever hears, is a sawtooth. That is a classical result rather than a synthesiser’s approximation, and it is why the source here is a sawtooth and not a stack of partials somebody chose.
Two things blur that ideal corner on a real instrument, and both are in the model. The string’s stiffness and the width of the bow hair round the slip off, which is a filter; and the sticking and slipping is never perfectly regular, which is noise — most of it at the start, before the string has settled. That is why a bow attack has a scratch in it and why bowing harder here makes the note brighter and not merely louder. A sampled violin at a fixed dynamic cannot do that, and the missing brightness is the usual giveaway.
Then the box. A sawtooth on its own is a buzzer; what makes it a violin is a body with strong resonances in particular places — the air resonance around the f-holes near the open D, the two main wood modes a little above it, and a broad rise around two to three kilohertz from the bridge itself, which is where the violin’s carrying power lives. All four are in the chain here, and so is the roll-off below them, because a violin genuinely does not radiate its own bottom note.
What is not claimed: that this is any particular violin. Every one of those resonances varies by tens of hertz between two good instruments, and that variation is most of what people mean when they say one sounds better than another. The pitches on this page are generated from a rule and checked against charts reviewed elsewhere on this site; the body is a plausible violin rather than a measured one, and there is no chart it could be checked against because there is no such thing as the violin body.
Playing it with a keyboard
The letter keys shown on each string sound the open strings, and — unlike every other instrument here — the note lasts as long as you hold the key down. Let go and the bow comes off. Hold two keys for a double stop.
What a keyboard cannot reach is the fingerboard: there is no key for “and three semitones up”, so stopped notes are a pointer or a finger. That is a genuine gap rather than an oversight, and it is the same one the virtual oud has for the same reason — on a fretless instrument the interesting half is the continuous one.
Once it is in tune in your hands
This page is for playing a violin you do not have. If you do have one, the thing you actually need is on the other side of the site: pegs that move in jumps larger than the correction you want, fine tuners that exist precisely because of that, and an A that is probably not 440.
The violin tuner takes it from there — including how to get into the three cross tunings above without breaking a string, and what to do when the peg slips back the moment you let go of it.