Isekai Ukulele

Category: Ukulele

For categorizing posts by the relevant ukulele.

  • Trouble in Paradise

    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!

  • 2025 Performance Goals

    One of my goals for this year is to focus on polishing up a set of vocal ukulele covers to get it to “performance quality” where I would feel satisfied with my mastery over the material to the point that I could present it with pride. This is not that.

    This is where I am today, and the hope is that in a few months I will be able to run this set again at significantly higher quality. Or at least by the end of 2025. Guess we’ll see. The idea is that I’ll pick 3 songs a week to work on, and try to tune them up to standard. Maybe I’ll make a tutorial for the mini-set, or just do a minor presentation of the weekly progress. That’s the plan.

    These are the songs I want to play well, and how I sing them currently. Some songs are almost there, but most need much improvement. Lots to work on!

    A better way to do this would be to join up with other people and get both the external and internal feedback from the experience of live performance. Since I’m disabled and basically bedridden, it makes it very hard for me to leave my room. So, I’m relying on other methods.

    Luckily, everyone has a camera in their phone these days, and so we can all record ourselves and see what we look and sound like. It’s… not really super fun to watch your self flub up and identify all the mistakes, but I’m not doing it for “fun”. I’m doing it because I want to do better. It’s actually quite nice to have such a powerful tool for self-improvement at our fingertips. And it does become fun to work through the issues and get good.

    But don’t get me wrong: I am definitely embarrassed by this performance. The shame is only slightly buffered by the thought that very few with care to watch through this in the vast sea of content. I also recognize that even though I am hyper critical of all my flaws, there are those out there who may appreciate or even enjoy seeing the work in progress.

    I hope this might be something inspiring, either in the way of “I could do better, maybe I should make my own content too!” or “wow that level of skill seems attainable, and I can see how that eventually becomes solid. I can do that too!” And I truly hope that in a few months I’ll be able to run this set much more proficiently, and will look back at this recording and laugh. Here’s hoping.

    The main issues I notice to work on are intros/endings, first note pitch and pitch in general, instrumentals and breaks, and of course, memorizing the lyrics and chords. I really need to sit down and work out proper instrumentals for many of the songs to compliment the singing. Also the break sections in many of the songs give me trouble, typically because of a change in pitch and chords.

    Also, add reverb to the vocals. My lord. I was hearing reverb while I was playing, but it didn’t get recorded because the wrong button was pressed on my mixer. Well, suppose that’s one way to make it seem like I’ve drastically improved in a very short time!

    I don’t like trying to brute force memorization, so instead I play through the setlist daily. So yeah, that means I drill into 3 songs specifically to work on them, and then play through the whole set, daily. This equates to about two hours of practice. I’d do more if I could, but that’s about as much as my voice and brain can handle. I usually take a several hour break and continue with instrumental / electric uke practice in the evenings.

    Well, ideally at least. I’ve had relatives in town for the holidays so I haven’t been able to drill down as much as I’d like – and I expect that this is a common problem for all of us. Life often gets in the way. Nothing to be done. Its rare for all my siblings to all be back in town, so I choose to spend time with them while I can. They all head home tomorrow though, so hopefully then the rubber hits the road.

    Here’s the set list on Spotify and the charts for it on Ultimate Guitar. About a third of the songs are actually relatively new to me so I’ve had to listen to them a bunch. I also make the whole set list to double check how it “flows” and feels when placed next to each other. I do re-interpret a couple of the songs by making them slower (or taking out the instrumentals because I’m weak). That’s all part of the process.

    I also run through the set as a “performance” practice by streaming that in the Uke Tribe Discord Woodshed at around 12pm HST unless otherwise noted in the #progress channel. If you have any interest in streaming or want to work out nerves in front of a small and supportive audience of fellow uke enthusiasts, feel free to join up and jam in the woodshed too!

    And last but not least, here are the time stamps for my setlist:


    0:00 Intro

    0:51 Nujabes – Luv Sic Part 2

    5:00 Old Crow Medicine Show – Wagon Wheel

    8:44 Counting Crows – Mr. Jones

    13:10 The Smiths – There is a light that never goes out

    17:03 The Temptations – Just my imagination

    20:15 Blind Melon – No Rain

    23:30 The Cure – Lovesong

    28:07 Depeche Mode – Enjoy the Silence

    30:50 Bruno Mars – Count on me

    34:50 Van Morrison – Brown Eyes Girl

    38:23 Crosby, Stills, & Nash – Love the one you’re with

    42:08 Jimmy Cliff – You can get it if you really want

    44:36 Jack Johnson – Better together

    48:20 Loggins & Messina – House at Pooh corner

    51:46 Israel Kamakawiwo’ole – In this life

    55:50 Hapa – Ku’u Home o Kahulu’u

    1:00:40 Neil Young – Harvest Moon

    1:04:08 Plain White T’s – Hey there Delilah

    1:09:12 The Killers – When you were young

    1:13:09 Mighty Mighty Bosstones – The impression that I get

    1:16:30 The Platters – My Prayer

    When I have a bit more time I’d like to write a bit about why I chose each song. Maybe I’ll do that in the follow up posts as I refine them.

    If any songs catch your ear and you are interested in seeing a tutorial or hearing them get polished up first, let me know on YT or Discord. I’m just playing it by ear, don’t really have an order of refinement. There’s enough variety here that I can kind of gravitate toward whatever I feel like working on, at the moment at least.

    And I think 12 songs for a full set sounds better than 11, so I’m open to a couple more suggestions to make a nice round double if anything comes to mind that you think would fit my style and vibe. I’m all ears!

  • Blues is the path to Jazz

    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.

  • Christmas Challenges

    Well, I lost two days to a migraine because that’s what happens to me when I’m not careful with my time. That’s why I’m disabled and doing this instead of working a real job like a normal person. I got a wish granted by the monkey’s paw: all the time in the world to do whatever I want, as long as I don’t get out of bed or get too intensely focused for too long. 

    It’s also why I watch so much anime. For some reason seeing real healthy beautiful people acting out imaginary problems just rubs me the wrong way, so I’m not as big of a fan of live action stuff. If you can tell by the name, I’m a real big fan of the isekai genre because oh it would be so lovely to be reborn in a new world with a working body (and preferably a cheat skill). Anyway, during this episode I made it through Pseudo Harem, which was actually pretty sweet. Romance is also usually not my thing since I’m an eternally lonely hikki-neet living with his parents irl, but I can appreciate a good story. And anime relationships are usually so wild and contrived (just talk to each other dammit!!!) but every once in a while it’s nice to get hit with the saccharine feels. I liked it enough I’m actually thinking about adding one of the op or ed songs to the transcription list. Maybe someday. Before that though, I have a long list of very well known songs I’ve been wanting to transcribe for fingerstyle, so I’ve got a lot of songs lined up already. 

    I was actually able to make some progress in transcribing one of the most important songs to get right, but it needs a little bit more time in the oven before I’m ready to share it. And while I was working on it I was blindsided by a fantastic suggestion of a method to practice playing in a key from the Uke Tribe Discord. Instead of following through with my plans, I spent several hours just running around the fretboard in the key of F! Well, it was really fun, and I got so engrossed by it because the value of doing it was so obvious. 

    This week’s discord challenge was also to record a Christmas tune, and the Ukulele Underground Forum had a Christmas song thread as well, so that’s what I’m featuring today:

     

    These are actually some kinda new songs to me, my mom learned to dance hula to them from her classes, so we want to put on a little show when the whole family is around next week. We’ll see if we actually perform them, but I think the songs are interesting and fun enough to share. I wanted to do a whole Christmas set (two actually) but losing days to pain always kinda kills my motivation so… maybe next year. The songs will surely be more polished by then too, so your ears can thank me then! 

  • Is it the instrument, or do I just suck?

    Spoiler alert: I just suck. Perfect example of why I call myself “intermediate” level. I can make it through my songs, but it’s not always great the first time. I don’t think it’s super awful, but I do think it could be much, much, MUCH better. It’s actually pretty difficult to jump between tenor and baritone scale, at least for where I’m at right now. I have less than a year of experience with baritone, and most of that has been focused on fingerstyle, so I’m really exploring new waters here. I thought it would be natural for me to swap back to tenor, but well, here we are. You can judge for yourself: 

    Truth be told, I would not play these songs this way on my acoustic uke. I just used the same effects as I did with the electric to emphasize the difference between the two instruments. Ideally you would sculpt your effects to really take advantage of your magnetic or piezo pickup. Having only had the electric for a week, I’ve just been using what I already had set up for my acoustic-electric. So in that regard, these effects should probably sound a bit more appropriate in this context, as they were mostly initially designed for this ukulele. 

    Regardless, I don’t really like to drown my acoustic ukes in effects like this, so I would probably just play it on my basic “acoustic” setting which actually has a bit of delay and reverb to help thicken up the sound. It’s hard for me to use proper acoustic microphones because I’m stuck in bed and it’s kind of a nightmare to manage that, a vocal mic, and a camera all at the same time. And because I don’t use a DAW, I can’t really do noise reduction or add non-destructive efx in post. Just gotta do it live!  

    Actually, recording a stripped down set like that is probably tomorrow’s project, hence this being part 1. I was having so much fun it seems I’ve overextended myself and have a major migraine coming on, so I’m going to have to put any more music work aside for the time being. 

  • One week with an Electric Ukulele

    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! 

  • New Ukulele Day!

    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