A goal without a plan is but a dream. Dream’s are fine, but they as free and plentiful as the stars. We can dream as much as we like. There’s nothing wrong with chasing a dream, holding to a dream, or letting go of one at any time. After all, they are just the flickers of imagination that fill our head at night.
An issue only arises when we start wanting to make our dreams a reality. For most, dreams are challenges that lie beyond the reach of ordinary effort – if it were easy we’d just get it already. I have found that when I want to get from here to there in the most effective way possible, a plan is an indispensable tool.
A plan begins with a goal. What are we trying to achieve? We identify the conditions for success. Then we look at all the obstacles in the way, and then how to overcome those. Without being explicitly written out, its easy for things to slip between the cracks. After all, the goal is a challenge because we are reaching for something our grasp.
When we put the plan in motion, we get feedback so that we can better choose how to spend our limited time and energy to get to where we want to be. It’s important to have the solid description of what was tried so we know what works to repeat, and what to change to do better next time.
Of course, I’m writing all this now because I have no plan. And I’m doing this instead of writing a plan because I don’t know what my goal is. I find myself in a post-sprint exhaustion wherein I’ve accomplished my initial goal and am uncertain of the direction I want to go from here.
In truth I wanted to have the plan written out before starting this blog so I could hit the ground running and not look back. But I kept putting that off to the point where I decided it would probably serve me to just jump in and play it by ear.
That balance of rigidity to flexibility is always a difficult thing to maintain. Sometimes just going for it works out. Done is always better than perfect. Reality always trumps fantasy. Now I have a blog, instead of just vague dreams of a blog.
And so here I am caught in between breaths not knowing which direction to take. There’s nothing wrong with just doing whatever feels right, but it’s hard to maintain the momentum to overcome difficult challenges when there’s no shining light at the end of the tunnel. This week’s offering is exactly that: a half-assed interpretation of a song I’d like to play, but was not willing to put in the effort to do it properly.
Doing it “properly” means learning how and why this song that I like works, and brings me a step closer to understanding how the musician I admire created it. Instead, I just churn out what sounds “close enough” to me and is fun and easy for me to play. I like it enough to share, but it doesn’t push me closer to any specific goal.
Here’s the real song:
Right now I just have a general goal at getting better at playing ukulele, and any playing can be considered a step in the right direction. But its a stark contrast to having a set of repertoire to polish up to “performance ready.” I felt the improvement, and felt the accomplishment for the work I did over the past few months, but where to go from here is unclear.
I have a thing where I try continuously have to realign my ideas of “what I want” with “what I actually do.” For example: I think and say that “I want to be a better ukulele player” and so I practice daily. But the way that I practice by default is not in a way that moves me toward the direction of the “better ukulele player” that I want to be. Objectively, these actions reflect that I “just want to have fun making noise” instead of becoming a “better player.”
At the start of the year I set a goal to polish up a set that I could take to play by a pool. I made a plan to focus on three songs a week, followed through on the plan, and feel like I now have a set that I could play in public. It was freaking hard. I never put in that kind of work before to become a better player, and without a hard challenge I’m slipping back into my default practice habits.
But that’s the kind of “better player” I want to be. I want to be able to proudly play in public. Maybe? Maybe not, since I’m not doing it. I need to get out of my house and try it out more, but my physical condition makes it an somewhat risky activity. There’s a rather high chance that I will wind up with nausea and a harsh migraine that will last for several days if I dare to push my physical limits.
There’s a lot of music I’m interested in being able to play too. I still have all the anime music instrumentals I want to learn to play. I’ve picked up some new modern pop songs and some new older pop songs to extend the performance set. There’s a handful of jazz standards that are entering my repertoire. I’ve even managed to play an hour’s worth of instrumentals, albeit at a lower level of polish than performance set.
Going outside to perform might be worth the risk. I can get it if I really want, but I must try, try, and try. If I really want to “get there” someday, I need another plan. I need to find where “there” is. Then I can try to find the right path to travel. Just, where is it that I want to go? What is worth putting all the effort and energy into?
Why not just chill and not worry about it and watch more isekai?
It’s a new pedal week! I’m a little delayed in posting because I was just having so much fun with it. The Simplifier X I picked up for the Sparrow finally came in (handmade from Chile!) and it’s opened up a whole new world of sound for me to explore. I was feeling a bit overwhelmed until I realized that it has 54 different amp + cab + speaker configurations available, which rockets up to over 700 combinations if we consider running both channels in stereo. Plus 10 contour/eq/volume knobs and reverb for each of them that drastically changes the tone and acoustic qualities. So yeah, no surprise when there’s so many choices.
As someone who hasn’t really used a guitar amp, it’s definitely a bit overwhelming. But it’s also pretty amazing to have such a wide variety of choices to explore. I’m looking forward to learning how to dial in my favorite sounds over the next few months and figure out what kind of amps I may be interested in owning one day. I’m glad I was convinced to go with the analog modeling route of this pedal instead of one of the many digital options. It really feels great to play, and though I don’t really have the contrasting experience with digital, I certainly appreciate the immediateness of the response and the complete lack of menu diving.
Also I’m back up to 3 strings on the electric, and finally enjoying feeling some of the progress I’ve made during the unitar study. Anyway, here’s some day one noodling with the pedal after finding some sounds I liked:
Driven noodles
Clean noodles
Acoustic Electric through the grit
And for this week, I actually managed to make some progress on the performance set! I got three of the five remaining challenge songs memorized, and actually have the lyrics for the rest down pretty well. It’s just a matter of solidifying the chord changes for the last few, and hammering out instrumentals. And working on the vocals. Same story as ever!
Ku’u Home O Kahalu’u – Olomana
Song Choice
It would be remiss to not include some classic tunes from Hawaii in my setlist. I’m not Hawaiian and I don’t speak the language or really know a lot of traditional hula songs, but I did grow up here in the islands and am familiar with a range of early contemporary music. It’s not typically my preferred musical taste, but I appreciate all kinds of music. And this is only half about me. The other half is about you, the audience. So I hope this is a selection that can be enjoyed.
I like that the song is a sweet ode to growth, change, and acceptance. It seems to me entirely heartfelt. It captures a romantic notion of Hawaii and recollections of our youth. I imagine many people can relate to that wistful longing for the home of our youth. But times change, and the best thing to do is move along with it. Personally, I’ve had to accept a lot of change – losing my pride, and finding myself again in the aftermath. Definitely a song worth singing.
Instrumentation
Like “Just my Imagination” this is primarily a two chord song with a couple G7’s thrown in. There is an instrumental introduction and break in the original, and in typical fashion for this time around I am skipping them entirely. For this song I use a much more traditional strum, though I do employ some pedaling on G to emphasize certain parts with the C5 chord. I also like to let bass notes drone out a bit on this one to kind of emulate the slack key style of the original. This is actually one I’ve made a fingerstyle arrangement for before too, but I need to revisit that (and relearn it a bit) before sharing it again.
Vocals
Memorizing the lyrics was a challenge like usual, and this time I employed the method of trying to fully understand how the story progresses in the song. First we remember days when we were younger, and this makes me fear that I won’t be as I left you. Then we remember days when we were wiser, and this makes me fear that you won’t be as I left you. Finally we remember days when we were smiling, and I will greet you as I find you with the sharing of a brand new song.
So as we remember our younger days, we fear that we have changed. Then we remember our dreams and fear that you have changed. Finally we accept the change and will greet you as we are. I appreciate that kind of resolved acceptance.
The singing itself needs a bunch of the standard stuff I’m working on, and I’m not entirely satisfied with my ability to hit the notes in the bridge on the head every time. But I think it’s still better than it was. Hopefully I’ll be able to polish it up over the coming weeks.
In this life – Iz
Song Choice
You can’t play ukulele and ignore Bruddah Iz. I mean you could, and actually I would, save that I don’t want to be known as that guy who only plays The Smiths and The Cure on uke. Like the last one, this was picked to be a crowd pleaser – and a staple if I ever decide to try playing at being a wedding singer. I’m not really interested in that, but you never know. It might be nice to one day be skilled enough that that’s an option, right? And this is a sweet song. I almost think it’s a religious thing, but he left it open enough that it could be purely about romance.
Speaking of Iz, I kind of would rather not play his version Somewhere Over the Rainbow. It’s not a Hawaiian song, it’s not an original song, and it’s not particularly compelling enough for me to learn to sing proficiently. I recognize its quality and the impact it has had in the public sphere, and I probably should learn it properly anyway, but I feel like it’s a bit passe. At least if you’re trying to play a Jake song you want to be able to match his technical prowess to even attempt it. I’ve put some time into learning Hawaii ‘78 to play instead in case anyone asks me to play Over the Rainbow. Yeah, that’s how I roll. Cry for the gods, cry for the people, cry for the land that was taken away.
Instrumentation
This one is in a weird key, and it took me a long time to understand the chord changes. I mean, it’s not really a weird key – key’s are just keys right. Bb isn’t really any stranger than C. But I guess it’s a less common one on ukulele. And the progression is a little different than most tunes as well. There are times where the chords are held to start the next phrase, or abruptly changed to land on the refrain. Oh and instrumental breaks? Skip. I know, I’m weak. I do like to do a little picking in some parts and strumming for others though, so I didn’t abandon the instrumentation completely.
Instead of trying to learn the song as a whole, I approached it by connecting the chord changes to the different lyrical progressions. So like, “In this life, I was loved by you” has certain chords associated with it. The timing of chord changes in the verses do make sense, but trying to remember it separate from the lyrics was proving too much of a challenge. Now I just sing the lyrics and play the chords that sound right for that moment. Is that a little esoteric? It feels very Hawaiian style to me, don’t think too hard just play. Appropriate for a Hawaiian style song.
Also I added in a couple things not written in the tab. First, some Bb7’s to the transitions that I don’t think were in the original, just because I think it sounds better. Second I did a little thing to move up to a higher F chord in the E chord shape in the bridge. Maybe that can make up forr not having an instrumental solo.
Vocals
Obviously I’m no Iz, and the singing was a typical challenge for a slower song like this. Just gotta do the best I can to make it sound as good as possible. Apply all those voice lesson learnings. Start and stop notes the right way, sing with a good tone, enunciate, etc. Memorizing the lyrics wasn’t too bad since there’s really only two short verses and a break. Just bringing it all together and selling it is the challenge.
This one is a bit tricky because I don’t really have anyone I actually feel this way about in my life, so I kind of just have to sing it with the hope that someday I may. I kind of understand it because I’ve definitely felt like I’ve “found the one” before except that every time it was just kidding. Oh well. Part of the joy of art is that we can celebrate ideass beyond our current situation.
House at Pooh Corner – Loggins and Messina (Ka’au Crater Boys)
Song Choice
I’m definitely one of those kids who grew up liking the Ka’au Crater Boys without realizing that a lot of their music were actually covers. They were just so good and sounded so right on the ukulele that I assumed they were all originals. This song is no exception. But it’s a great song, and I think it nicely bridges a gap between the people like me who grew up with the uke version, and the broader audience who know the original from Loggins and Messina. I also fondly remember Winnie the Pooh, and I’m not trying to break into China anytime soon so it seemed like a nice choice.
I intentionally chose a lot of older songs for this set because I’m aiming for an audience of people around my age and older. I’d like these songs to remind people of their childhood, or their parents. And so this is a perfect fit as a song reminiscing about a more innocent time. It’s the kind of song that if I heard someone playing it well on the beach, I might actually hang out nearby to hear more. Which is kind of the current goal to be honest. I don’t know if or when I’ll be able to land a poolside gig, but the beach is always an option!
Instrumentation
This song… has a lot of chords. And they change quickly. The timing is a bit unique too. I’m pretty sure it’s 4/4 but it’s quite syncopated so I don’t really bother counting. I just kind of play it as I hear it. Luckily the chord chart is pretty accurate. Still it took me quite a long time to memorize the various progressions for the different parts of the song. My approach is always to just play the song every day, and eventually the time will feel right to look away from the chart. In this case it took about a month to be able to look away, but then I never had to sit down and force myself to try and memorize all the chords. It’s still not 100%, but I’m getting close.
Vocals
Compared to the chords, memorizing the lyrics for this one was relatively easy. I think the concise narrative structure made it easier for me to memorize. Or maybe it’s because I listened to the song a lot while growing up, so learning the words just kind of clicked. It’s nice that there aren’t many subtle turns of phrase until the very end, unlike several other songs on my list (including Ku’u Home).
There are some very high notes while chasing the bees and clearing the skies. I can only hope I can hit them when the time comes. Also at the end of each chorus there’s a tricky note to land on for that final “Pooh.” It’s part of why the ending works as well as it does, but it’s also a challenge to execute consistently. Just gotta keep practicing!
Recording
So I think I got the gain staging better so that there’s not so much hiss over everything whenever sound comes through. And got the reverb back. It took some rerouting of my whole signal, but I was doing that anyway to integrate the new amp sim pedal. As predicted, it basically took an entire day, and I still had to stop before getting to an ideal configuration because I just ran out of upright time. Bit by bit I’ll get there.
Once I get really dialed in I’ll do a whole rundown of my rig, which is kind of a unique dawless contraption built to be pushed over my bed so I can work it while laying down. I’m also finding I need to change some settings depending on the venue that the audio is going through: zoom is different from discord is different from recording video for the phone. Oh the fun never ends.
Performance
I’m much happier with the performance this week. It’s been on my mind all month to memorize these ones, and its finally clicked. I don’t like trying to brute force memorization over short time frames, so instead I just play the song every day until I don’t need to look at the lyrics and chords anymore.
It’s still not perfect, and I’m still copping out of doing proper instrumentals, but these nice slow songs let me practice my new approaches to singing which is kind of the theme of the week. I’ll definitely have to do a second pass over all of these to get proper instrumentals in, and continue improving the vocal quality, but I’m feeling like the setlist is coming together.
I’m thinking about trying to go to the beach and try play through it all in public someday soon. Or maybe host an online performance somehow. Either way I’ll have to do a follow up of the full set to compare to how I was at the start of the year, so I’d better start thinking about how to make that happen.
TL;DR I’m dumb.The buzzing was caused by me touching my phone while it was charging. Seems like touching a charging cable electrifies you in a way that can’t be felt, but can be picked up by a sensitive device like the Sparrow. 100% user error. Problem has been solved and the uke still plays like a dream.
So, above is the short version. It was entirely my inexperience with electric ukes that caused this non-problem. But since I am documenting this experience, I would be remiss to admit that this did cause me several days of frustration!
It started when I was noodling around practicing my F scales in the woodshed with a couple of the gang tuning in. I’ve been learning more about overdrives and amps and was playing with a high-gain effects patch with tons of spacy reverb to explore lush layers of sound. It was really good fun, but toward the end I started noticing that horrifying sound of static popping from a failing instrument cable.
Here’s a sample of the style (made after the problem was solved)to listen to while reading my tale of being a total steel-string magnetic coil instrument noob:
Since I was playing live, the only thing to do was stay as still as possible and hope it wouldn’t be too intrusive. But of course playing moves the instrument around, so I couldn’t avoid the static attack. It was only in the woodshed though, so nobody cares if you drop the ball, but its never fun to have that kind of thing interrupt your playing.
So right after we wrapped up I tried plugging the chord into one of my acoustic-electrics to see if it was the cable that was messed up. There was no issue with that. Yikes. It might not be so obvious in this initial short because this was recorded just with my phone mic so I could talk and describe the problem, but a little further down is another example of me recreating the issue in a much clearer manner while recording with my line-in signal.
(Both shorts are unlisted and should only be visible within the context of this post.)
The next day I opened up the back panel (with a little effort – the back was really hard to take off initially! It did come off eventually) to take a look at the wiring inside. I’m am admittedly not savvy when it comes to things like this, but I can at least identify crossed wires or things that look out of place. I’ll say I am well versed in the tried-and-true “poke it and see if that is the problem” method. Well, the wiring looked pretty meticulously and clean. There seemed to be no issues with the internal construction.
It was actually pretty cool to look inside and see the hollow-ness of my uke. Sorry, hard not to get distracted by the craftsmanship. Anyway, I noticed that I could cause the popping by touching the little foil strip that was next to the input jack. I’ve since learned that this is electromagnetic shielding, but before diving into this issue I didn’t really understand why the base and back plate were covered by such nice shiny and obviously carefully placed foil.
Since poking that point caused some static, and putting pressure on the back plate seemed to be a trigger for the issue. I decided to try put a piece of tape on top to break the connection to the foil on the shielding plate.
This seemed to mostly clear up the issue. Mostly. The static and popping was still there, just a lesser amount. And that’s really no good if I’m trying to create lush walls of sound. But was late so I went to sleep and decided to try work on it in the morning.
To my surprise, in the morning things had changed. Instead of static popping, my sound signal was cutting out completely in a classic display of a faulty instrument cable. Was it the cable after all? I redid the check with an acoustic-electric, and it was still fine. But still not ok in the electric. Very strange.
So I swapped out the cable, and… the complete signal loss stopped, but the static popping remained. My running theory for this is that because the Sparrow is about 1/2 the thickness of my acoustic ukes, it presses up against my bed in a different manner than the acoustics, causing problems with it that my acoustics might avoid. I’ve ordered a right-angle cable for the electric uke that should be better.
Ok, so fresh cable in, problem still persists. Next I thought that because I’m laying in bed, I maybe I could be putting an unusual pressure on the back plate that caused the block of the Tone knob to hit the foil and cause some sort of loop. So I put tape on top of that rectangle too. No change. I was out of ideas, so it was time to ask the Uke Tribe if they had any ideas. So I grabbed my phone and made another video to show what was happening.
Ironically, I unplugged my phone from charging to use the camera kit and capture the line in tone… and the buzzing stopped! D’oh! This video was captured by touching the charging cable even when the phone wasn’t plugged in, which I quickly discovered was a thing once I identified the culprit.
So in short: using the phone by itself is fine. Touching the charging cable by itself is not fine. Using the phone while it is charging is also not okay. But otherwise, there is no problem. I took off the tape that was interrupting the shielding contact, and it played again like the day I got it.
I certainly didn’t anticipate that my entire body would become slightly charged by just touching this cable. Thinking about it further, I suspect most people who are sitting or standing while playing probably have their phone on a desk or at arms length somehow so they may rarely have the charging cable in contact with their body while playing. And since my acoustic-electrics are all piezo-based, the extra charge never caused any problems.
So in the end it kind of was a special issue caused by my unique situation. But if you ever hear a buzz when you put your charging phone down on your lap… there is a supremely simple fix to the problem. Don’t touch that wire while playing! It could happen to you!
If you are new to the electric instrument game like me, maybe my experience here can save you some headache. Let’s have fun rocking our ukes, not troubleshooting random static!
I wasn’t really ready to start this project, so a lot of it will be slowly built out live. But now that the ball is rolling, nothing to do but chase after it. It all started when I randomly clicked on a Reddit post promoting the Ukulele Tribe Discord. That was apparently formed after some drama on the Ukulele Underground forums, but I haven’t dug too far into that and frankly don’t care much for drama. Anyway, I joined both groups, and wanted to share my electric uke journey with them, and so pulled the trigger on making my own little corner of the internet.
As it happens, a new friend from the discord who is an actual professional musician has been giving me some great advice on different ways to improve, so that’s been taking up an unexpected amount of time. But I’m spending the time to act on the advice because it will be so clearly useful to me. It’s really not anything super unheard of before – focus when you practice, learn the notes on your fretboard, listen to music that defines the style you want to play.
When I mentioned I wanted to play jazz, he suggested that I start by getting really familiar with blues. Well, to tell the truth, I’ve never been super interested in blues music. I love all the complexity inherent in jazz and have listened to quite a lot of that, but my musical tastes have always been a bit eclectic. My favorite genres are shoegaze, goth rock, punk, emo, hardcore, ska, industrial, idm, some edm, a range of jazz styles (bebop, big band, neo and electro-swing, gypsy, modal, smooth, swing), ambient and experimental, classical, and of course, anime songs.
Notably missing from this list are blues and pop. Actually I have a fondness for 80’s, 90’s and early 00’s music, but a lot of early rock and classic pop eludes me. I don’t mind most of it, but I don’t usually choose to listen to a lot of the more well known artists of the past half century. When I want to perform, I usually feel a need to go out of my way to find songs that I hope other people have heard. And since I’m starting this project to put myself and my music in front of people,
So I put together a playlist of songs I think that I would like to perform, and I think that people would like to hear. The advice was to work on 3 songs at a time and polish them up to become performance ready, so that will be the project for the tenor and singing for the foreseeable future. These aren’t really songs that I would choose to polish for the sake of singing to myself, but I like them enough to put the work in to present it to the world. I would really like to do more of my eclectic favorites, but maybe that can wait until I have more of an audience.
The next piece of advice was that if I want to play jazz, I should listen to more blues and learn to play it. Makes sense, if I want to play a certain genre, I should learn about its roots and develop a sense of how it got to be what it is. And so begins a journey to learn the blues. I was actually surprised, the original blues are a lot more raw and soulful than I had expected. I am quite liking it too actually.
And learning to love the 12-bar blues is looking to be more exciting than I had expected too. Tonight I spent a couple hours just noodling a scale over the progression while learning where the notes on my fretboard are. Imagine that, nearly 10 years in and I never took the time to properly learn my fretboard notes before. I mean, for the majority of what I play, I only needed to know my chords and to be able to sing in tune. That was until I got bit by the baritone bug earlier this year and developed a taste for fingerstyle. And developed aspirations to actually be able to solo during the instrumental breaks, and maybe one day play solo jazz ukulele.
Here’s a little taste of my 12-bar blues noodling:
Apparently a generic 12-bar blues progression in F is copyrighted, but for now they seem to be allowing me to post the backing track, just in case anyone feels like some noodly practice of their own:
Well, it’s up for now. And yes, that’s a Digitone 2. I need to do a whole rundown my setup now that this channel is live, so stay tuned. I still think some better should music come first though.
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!
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!
