How to use tuner in your practice?

When incorporating tuners in your practice, there are important steps that I always advise my students to follow so that they can make the best use of it. Following those tips will make the process much more productive, and therefore you can yield a much better result. 

Connect tuner to speaker: 

When we practice with the tuner, we want to match the pitch to the tuner. In other words, we want to use our ears to guide us to make adjustments. We do NOT want to use visuals to guide us, either by looking at the movements of the needle or green and red lights on the tuner. However, when trying to match the pitch to the tuner, you will find that most tuners are too quiet compared to the violin volume. So we need to connect the tuner to a speaker so you can easily hear it when you play a passage at normal volume. It is an important step because when we play with different volume on the violin (in this case without the speaker, we have to play quieter in order to hear the tuner) it changes the pitch, and therefore making the practice ineffective. We need to make sure we are playing at the volume that we will be playing in the performance. You can use any tuners you can access online as long as the A=440. Here the link to the tuner I frequently use: https://faculty.washington.edu/brockman/TuningDrones/TuningDrones.htm

Tune only the 1st, 3rd, and 5th notes of the key of the piece 

When we practice any tonal music with a tuner, the notes that we want to tune to are the 1st, 3rd and 5th notes of the key of the piece that we are playing. The reason is because we want to play in whichever key the piece is in. So first we need to define the 1st, 3rd, and 5th note of the key in the tonal space. If these three notes are in tune with the tuner, the rest of the notes will most likely be in tune.  

If the piece goes into another key, then we need to change the notes that we are tuning. We want to tune the 1st, 3rd, and 5th notes in the new key. This applies when there is a key change in the key signature. If the section spends an extensive amount of portion in another key, but is still labeled with the original key signature, then it is debatable whether we should tune in the new key or still tune in the original key. If the 1st, 3rd and 5th notes of the new key appear more often than the 1st, 3rd, and 5th note of the original key, then it might be a good idea to tune in the new key, and vice versa.