Courtesy of Music Teacher Magazine

Long-suffering violin, viola and cello teachers will be all too familiar with the problems
associated with stiff or slipping pegs. Hours of wasted lesson time cursing as you struggle to
turn the wretched things, only for them to slip back into their original position, must be a
contributing factor to stomach ulcers and high blood pressure in the instrumental teaching
profession – and that’s before you’ve watched students go home to practise for the week on
an instrument that they can’t tune themselves.

Wittner has come up with what it claims is a complete solution to this problem. The
German company, best known for metronomes, tailpieces and fine tuners, has ndeveloped pegs for violin and cello with a unique internal gearing system which, if it’s as effective as the company says it is, could render those hours of struggling with traditional pegs a thing of the past.

Here’s the science bit: The shaft of the peg does not move when positioned in the peg
box. The only parts of the peg that move are the button and the geared middle section of
the shaft on which the string is wound. The pegs have an internal gearing ratio of 8.5:1
affording very precise tuning. The mechanism is also ‘self inhibiting’, meaning that it cannot
slip back once tuned. The taper on the pegs is a standard 1:30 for violin and 1:25 for cello.

These pegs do exactly what they say on the tin – and what they say on the tin is truly
remarkable. They remove the need for brute strength to tune a stringed instrument,
making tuning a violin or cello as easy as tuning a guitar. The pegs need to be fitted by a
skilled luthier, but once they’re fitted, they are simple to use.

On the student cello on which I testdrove these pegs, adjusting the position of
bridge took only a couple of minutes. Tuning it took seconds, and it remained remarkably
stable. Even after taking the cello outside on a cold day in only a gig bag and bringing it back
into a warm room, it needed only minimal tuning.

Because the peg shaft does not move horizontally, there is a bit of a knack to
changing strings, which those accustomed to traditional pegs might find difficult at first. But
once the string is wound round the shaft a couple of times it’s plain sailing, and even for a
novice user, the time taken to change and tune a new string is greatly reduced. Unwinding a
string is a maddeningly slow process owing to the 8.5:1 gearing ratio that makes fine-tuning
so easy, but this is a small price to pay for the convenience that the product offers. If it were
possible to add a ‘release mechanism’ to future designs in order to facilitate quick winding and
unwinding when necessary, this would be a welcome feature.

Here’s the biggest problem though: so far, these pegs are only available in full sizes.
Surely the biggest beneficiaries of a product such as this would be small children who lack
the physical strength to tune their instruments? But as long as they remain
available only in full sizes, they remain available only to older children and adults.
Our poor cousins violists have also been overlooked as the pegs are currently
only available for violin and cello. This gives me a sad mental image of violinists and cellists
smugly tuning their instruments at warp speed, while the long-suffering viola section
lags far behind, wheezing like a bunch of unwilling teenagers on a cross-country run. I
hope that Wittner intends eventually to make this product available to both violists and
younger players – there will certainly be a
demand for it.

Another problem is that many older instruments have slightly differently-sized peg
boxes, and so fitting these pegs to old instruments is likely to necessitate expensive
adjustments. Although it’s possible in theory to fit the pegs to any instrument, it’s a product
that is primarily designed for modern and student instruments.
Finally, if you are a cellist whose head or neck ever collides with your C or G pegs, the
ease with which they move can prove disastrous!

Despite these issues, I can highly recommend these pegs for any student,
teacher or professional. This is an invention that could revolutionise the string playing
world. It is extremely reasonably priced and, once fitted, very user friendly. I only wonder
why it hasn’t been done before – after all,
similar technology has been available for guitarists and double bassists for years. Once
it catches on, as I’m sure it will, traditional pegs could be consigned to the Dark Ages.