some updates. My tenor guitar came. Oddly enough, my wife didn't pitch a fit. I suppose at this point she has become philosophic about it all. She probably thought, "at least it wasn't a $3000 koolau or a $4000 Lichty ukulele."
I tuned it like a baritone and play it like a baritone. And I play the baritone like I play a tenor. I have had my baritone for quite a long time now and still haven't taken even a step to learn its chords. I just play it. If I think about it, I am conscious that the G chord I am playing is actually a D chord...however I don't think about it. So the tenor guitar is nice. It is rough on my index finger and the skin right above the cuticle of the ring finger of my strumming hand gets sore--I guess that is the place from which I strum. It does get loud though.
I saw a video that made me think. It had that young ukulele player that won that talent contest. Long story, short: she said that it was impossible to distinguish songs without their lyrics because all songs use the same chords. Allowing for hyperbole and for facetiousness, she's probably right. No matter what the song is, you can probably use a C-F-G progression to pitch the music up or down as you need. This is especially true since the voice is doing most of the work and the music is in the background.
That doesn't apply to me. That applies to songs--viz., things that are sung--and I never sing. I work on getting my ukuleles melodic. To that end, here's what I've been doing.
I have been working on what I generically call my Blue Modes. They are just scales made from the blues scale. What differentiates them is where you start on the blues scale. Obviously, there are six scales because there are six notes in the blues scale. To keep it clear (in my mind,at least) I refer to each of my blue modes by the name of their degree: i.e., the tonic, supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant, and submediant.
I have been focusing on the blues in G as a case study because it work well with the fret markers. And I have been focusing on the tonic, supertonic, subdominant, and submediant shapes because they seem to work well together, having roots on the C and A strings. The obvious step to take is to work in the mediant and dominant shapes. The problem with them is that they work better with a low G. Since I have been enamored with my re-entrant kamaka I have been playing my blue modes with the first three strings only. I need to get my low G ukulele which can obviously play the first three strings as well as a different set of scales using all four strings. That is going to be key. I need to be able to shift from linear to re-entrant tuning to get the most out of all this.
An example, I could start of with a tonic shape (linear tuning) which has a root note on the E string. Other shapes with a root on the E string are supertonic (linear) or mediant, subdominant, dominant (re-entrant). So if I can switch my thinking from linear to re-entrant, then I get three more options.
This begs the question, why all this fuss about root notes? I have been told that root notes are kind of like end punctuation. It ends the phrase. To continue with this sentence-analogue: all my musical sentences are grammatically simple sentences. They have to be; I'm just learning. However, maybe I don't want to end my phrase. Maybe I want a compound or a complex sentence rather than a simple sentence. In that case, I wouldn't wait for a root note. I would just move from shape to shape at will. The danger of that is to appear to be rambling.
That's the state of my mind right now.