Here’s what I sound like after having a week to practice and play around with the uke. I have basically zero electric guitar / uke experience, so it really is a whole new world for me to explore. For now I postponed learning proper baritone chords and just picked songs that I could sing 5 steps lower (or 3 higher). Thoughts start at 30:40 if you’re mainly interested in those:
I’ll also summarize those thoughts here because I often would just rather read than click the video:
- Not having chucking to add percussiveness is still hard. More on that later
- I’ve settled on a thicker pick because the steel strings don’t offer the same kind of resistance as my acoustic fluorocarbons. I think it feels much better to have more pull, though I don’t think I’ll be going up to felt thickness anytime soon.
- Still playing tenor chords. Sorry. I’ll do it right someday I promise.
- The strings are super responsive to bends, hammer-ons, and pull-off’s. I noticed I have a tendency to pull my E chord (B on baritone) shape down slightly, which on acoustic is no problem at all, but on this one it can cause detuning. It’s just something new to pay attention to. It opens up opportunities (that I demonstrated by playing Lazy Eye) but also can cause problems.
- It’s a lot of fun with the effects. I’m really liking how that sounds.
- Steel strings kind of need to build up some new callouses. My fingertips are getting sore before my finger muscles.
- [Bonus] I forgot to mention this in the video but I’m not as comfortable palm muting with the palm on the bridge like I would on a guitar. Maybe it’s the instrument size? It just doesn’t feel right. Instead I’ve been kind of using my forearm to mute. You can see how it looks/sounds in the blink 182 song at 6:33.
A friend on the Ukulele Tribe discord (join link here) mentioned several important things to for me to consider:
- Chucking lower to the bridge, right over the magnetic coils might improve the percussiveness. There’s also some electric-specific techniques that can be developed.
- Raising the gain to maximum early in the chain is ideal, then dynamic range can be expressed through playing or by using the volume knob. Volume knob! That’s a thing!
- Once you plug in to amplification, you’re playing the speaker, not the instrument. The instrument is now just a tool to direct how the speaker should make the actual sounds. This is basically opposite of the acoustic approach, where the instrument is what makes the sounds (and a nice microphone is used to make that sound louder).
- I may want a proper amp to sculpt my sound even further
Sounds like these things are worth looking into more closely. The journey continues!