My friend coming back from a holiday to Indonesia inspired me, he was raving about finding this really cool guy who was living on a street corner making ukes out of old waste timber, packing cases, left over building site waste, old furniture, anything he could get his hands on, he was making guitars and ukes and giving them away to the street kids so they could busk with them. He was making some really whacky shaped original instruments and my friend brought back half a dozen ukes.
Now I'm a pretty serious guitar player, have been playing for nearly 40 years, and had never played a uke, I mean I'd strummed a couple of old cheap ones but never actually picked up one that was in tune and tried to get any proper sounds out of it, but I got hooked almost instantly and just had to have one.
Now, 6 months later, I hardly play my guitars at all and live on the ukes.
first I bought a Mahalo cheapy from the local music shop and the bridge snapped in 2 after a few days, so I took it back to the shop with the intention of either a refund or another Mahalo, Instead a came away with a 100 series rosewood eleuke for a total bargain price of 170 bucks (well it was ticketed at 300 but I got a 100 dollar discount because they were moving the shop to a new location and were just clearing stock, then I got the 29bucks credit for the Mahalo credited so for 171 dollars a had me an Eleuke and just totally fell in love with it.
Explaining it to the wife was a bit tricky, but it was close enough to my birthday to use that as the excuse
Since then I have bought a new Tanglewood concert for my wifeand I have had a few of these custom street ukes from indonesea knocking around the house too and i have been desperately trying to get my hands on a Dolphin, I haver emailed shops all over the world and people either don't have any in stock or don't ship to australia, I tried pretty much every australian music shop that google threw up and none of them have any Dolphins until at least late july, so if anyone wants to sell me one, please let me know. I cant wait to throw a set of aquilas on a good cheapy but only a dolphin will do, I have heard so many people rave about them.
So now im thinking of doing a luthiers workshop and building my own Tenor out of Australian timber, Maybe red cedar or a nice snow gum or red river gum eucalypt.
So thanks to Fritzy, the Indonesean chap that just loves making instruments and giving them away to kids, he was my inspiration.