My Sparrow Thunderbird arrived in the mail a week earlier than estimated! I thought I would have a bit more time to practice for the big reveal, but there was no way I wasn’t going to take it out of the box immediately to start jamming! I really wished there were more examples of what the uke sounded like while I was doing my research about the instrument, So, I decided to make it myself:
And well, it’s pretty rough. But it’s real! I only consider myself an upper-intermediate player, so I’m by no means a professional. And I figure most of us out there are not professionals, so, you know, it might be interesting to share the journey. This is my first, and right now only electric ukulele. Someday I may play it good XD
I’ve been playing acoustic ukulele since 2015, primarily tenor (low g) and in the “singing with strumming” style. I started on a quite affordable Luna tenor with a cheesy tribal engraving on it. Sounded pretty decent, but over the years I think its neck bent and now it only stays in tune with itself. Not a team player. My next uke was a Mahogany Hula Ukes, an old factory-ordered brand that Mele Ukulele used to offer. I’m from born, raised, and living on Maui, and an unabashed Mele Ukulele fan. But at that point, about 5 years into my uke journey, a full Mele was a bit of a stretch both skill and price wise. You can certainly learn to drive in a Cadillac, but you don’t really need all the luxury when still just learning.
Another 3 years later I picked up my first true Mele, a solid body Koa tenor with a MiSi pickup. This is still my workhorse uke and weapon of choice. Just this year I discovered Baritone ukulele and nothing has been the same ever since. Now I have two baritones. The UAS (ukulele acquisition syndrome) finally hit, and hard haha. I still kind of want a nice reentrant (high g) concert, but my hands are really quite full with these two latest bari’s.
I’ve actually wanted an electric ukulele for quite some time now. You can see the results of a lot of my research in the Background Info post. First I thought it would be enough if I just got a nice pedal to drown my Mele in effects. That certainly was fun, but there’s a certain quality to the traditional acoustic-electric signal that wasn’t quite what I was wanting. And it seems a crying shame to cover up the beautiful acoustic tone of a koa uke with thick layers of reverb. The steel strings and magnetic pickups of a fully electric uke will have a quality much closer to an electric guitar than any acoustic-electric uke ever will.
Once I decided I wanted a steel string electric ukulele, the big question was which one? Since I live in a rather remote place, there’s not a very vibrant second hand market, so I didn’t want to plan to start cheap and plan to upgrade as I grew into it. I also figured saving up the extra for the higher end ukes would give me time to really settle on how badly I really wanted it. So I fixed my eyes on a Fanner, particularly their jazzy cut style since I’m quite fond of jazz guitar. I saw a lot of my favorite players (Jim Hall, Wes Montgomery, Joe Diorio, Joe Pass, etc) playing that semi-hollow body Gretsch style guitar, so I thought it would be pretty cool to have a uke version. I’d also learned by experience that not having a cutaway meant the highest frets were kind of hard to use, so I definitely wanted a cutaway for the electric. So the [jazzy venetian cutaway] was my initial focus of desire.
The next big question was what size to get. I was leaning toward baritone because a guitar-like sound was actually what I was going for. You can always put a capo on 5 to play in GCEA but you can never get a tenor down to DGBE. Only problem was I had never actually tried a baritone ukulele. I wasn’t sure if the size or scale length would be a significant issue. It also happened that the iconic Mele Ukulele store in Wailuku was closing after being there since before I was born (they’re still around with two other stores on island, just this location was going away), so I went down one last time to try out a baritone.
Long story short, I came home with a brand new acoustic baritone Mele ukulele. It felt so good to play I just couldn’t put it down. It sparked a desire in me to play fingerstyle, which I really hadn’t put much time into over all these years. In fact, I originally and am still currently planning for the Isekai Ukulele project to be mostly fingerstyle baritone, but sometimes life happens and your plans just need to adapt.
So, baritone scale length was no problem. Fretting certain things was a little trickier just because of the increased size, but overall it’s pretty comfortable. Learning proper baritone chords has been an interesting challenge, but since I never really wanted to sing with my acoustic bari it wasn’t a big priority. On the flip side, I was suddenly very familiar with the fretboard from fret 5 and up. That makes jumping up to chords in middle positions all the easier. But really I’ve mostly been reading tab and practicing fingerstyle on the baritone. But I digress.
Before placing my order, I had one last thing to consider. I made a post on Reddit asking for anyone with experience for insight on choosing between a tenor or baritone size electric. I had never played an electric before in either form, and nobody I know around here has one or sells them. I wasn’t about to spend close to a grand and wait 6 months for a Fanner without asking for input from people who have actually played one!
You can read through the thread for yourself, but one thing that struck me is that there is a sizable group of people who will say “just get a guitar instead.” As it so happened, a good deal on a used Gretsch guitar showed up on craigslist, and so I thought well, instead of getting the ukulele that looks like a Gretsch, why not just get the Gretsch?! So I bit the bullet and pushed my plans to order the custom uke back a few months to get the guitar.
And it’s a beautiful guitar. Plays wonderfully, sounds great, looks like it belongs in the hands of Chet Atkins himself. Unfortunately my issue of being primarily bedridden makes playing it rather difficult. The size and weight of the instrument cause significant issues for me.. The dimensions of the neck are quite noticeably bigger than on ukulele. The extra strings and the reduced vertical distance between strings also makes clear how different of an instrument it is. I really feel like guitar and uke are cousins. And most of the time you wouldn’t ever confuse a cousin for a sibling. Aside from having frets and similarly tuned strings, the differences are pretty major.
It’s also another example of an instrument really meant to be played while upright. Sitting up and playing it feels like a dream. If doing that didn’t aggravate my particular medical condition, I would have happily accepted this instrument for all my electric explorations. If I really had no choice, I could probably make it work. But I do have a choice. And I chose to continue focusing on the instrument I have been playing, which is the ukulele. There’s also a whole thing about how the limit to four strings forces a certain type of sound and creativity, and I talk about that more in my ukulele vs. guitar section. Not having a low E or A string means you have to do things differently than a guitar would.
Having had a taste of the “real” deal, I suddenly felt much less inclined to also own the ukulele version of it. I was also somewhat concerned about ordering from such a distant country, and so I reconsidered. Sparrow was the next custom shop in line, and they were located within the United States, so that was a plus for me. And they just so happened to be offering a semi-hollow body baritone uke in their signature cut. Having just had an issue with the weight of my instrument, this seemed very appealing. And they would make and ship the instrument in a matter of weeks, rather than months.
I had a few concerns about the instrument, so I called the number on the website. It’s a funny thing: that connects to a guitar and ukulele shop, and then they give you the right number to call to speak to John the luthier directly. I had some questions about the weight and how the uke would feel while laying flat, and got all my concerns answered to my satisfaction. And with a little advance on my Christmas present, I was able to place the order.
He actually managed to ship it out before the 14 days reserved for production, and then the stars aligned for the shipping to skip an entire week of estimated transit. I just woke up one day and they said it would be arriving. So I had to scramble to be ready for this unboxing!
Todo: Add text summary of thoughts