my ukulele progress

Hello world. I have been playing so much that I haven’t chronicled my progress for posterity’s sake. It does beg the question of why do people create engaging content that would earn likes. That would be a full-time job. Or, if not quite that, it would at least take a great portion of time which could and should be devoted to playing.

I re-string my Yorkie with Fremonts. I always feel a bit wasteful doing so. I mean...I didn’t have a broken string. The old strings were merely six months old and I put new ones on. Originally I was going to use Living Waters strings but at the eleventh hour I changed my mind because

1. Living Waters sounds like some non-denominational Christian sect and that annoys me generally
2. Living Waters strings are clear and that presents a few problems to me. First of all, I associate clear strings with a brighter sound and I am desperately trying to distance myself from that Tiny Tim, trebly, island sound. Secondly, I don’t like the look of the clear string on a dark fret board. My Viburnum fret board is dark and dark strings look better.

Regardless, I put on the Fremonts and doing so was quite a task. The Yorkie’s bridge is rather idiosyncratic. When you push the string through the hole in the bridge, it hits a perpendicular wall that leads up to the saddle. Therefore, you have to bend the strings so that they inch up the wall so that you can get the string for tying.

Initially I tuned it DGBE because that E felt good to me. With the A string down-tuned to an E I could still bend the strings and perform my adornments such as the glissando/portamento. It is hard to fathom tightening the strings up to GCEA. That would make the strings like piano-wire. As the strings stretch out, there is a chance I will tune up to something like an EAC#F# as long as the tension still allows me the slack to do what I want. And here are some of the things I want and have been doing.

1. I am still trying to build a personal connection to the highest frets so that I can have those notes memorized. Intellectually I know what they are. They are an iteration of the lowest 7 frets. I know that but I am not feeling that. Thinking slows the music down. I want to be able to just slide my finger down a string and know when I get to a certain point that I am at, for example, an E. I am not quite there yet. However I am making progress because quite fortunately for me that C# on the 13th fret starts off my favorite mode, the aiolian. I love playing all varieties of it: the straight version, the melodic, the harmonic. I love playing chord progresions based on aiolian harmonizations. The only problem is that I know all the shapes so that sometimes I am not actually thinking about what I’m playing. I have to stay disciplined and think about the notes.

2. I am starting to think outside of the box. When playing the C# aiolian, I am starting to slide down to notes that are diatonic to it and make melodies that way. In essence, I am sliding down into the B mixolydian. Nevertheless, the lines are starting to get blurred. I can see that eventually the lines won’t matter and I’ll just be playing notes that are in the same key and exploring the possibilities. For example, I was playing with the G# Phrygian on the 13th fret, but instead of stopping on the octave note on the E string, I went on to the A and played more diatonic notes until I hit that D. Once I attain that, I can continue playing in the tonic pentatonic shape.

3. I have started doing an exercise which I have dubbed riffling. Just as you riffle two stacks of cards into one pile, I have been attempting to riffle together two scales into a pile of notes. I tried this at the fifth fret, using the C aiolian (starting on the G string) and the F ionian (on the C string). I play the first note of the aiolian, then the first on the ionian, then the second of each...etc. At this point I am very slow because I am still wrapping my head around it, so that I don’t know if it sounds good. I picked the root notes of C and F because they are a fourth apart and I thought they would cooperate with each other. But if the sound isn’t pleasing I might try other modes which don’t share the same frets. Something like an A lydian and a F ionian.

4. I also re-introduced myself to an older exercise in which you take a mode and plays notes 1,2,3 then 2,3,4, then 3,4,5 etc. If you can do this fast enough it sounds really good. I believe heavy metal guitarists do this sort of thing. I am not electrified and shredding; I do this because it breaks associations. I tend to group the notes of a mode played on the string as a unit. And that’s fine. It has put me in good stead for improvising. However, when you play one or two notes on one string and another note from another string, it opens up new avenues.

5. As for progressions, I have been hovering around the harmonic minor harmonization. I’ve been experimenting with different chordal qualities without much luck.

I received the ubiquitous email that many other customers of Daniel Ward received advertising his new finger style book. I of course purchased it because it sounds so well adapted to my tastes. It teaches techniques that I can use as a spring board to my own creativity. It may seem solipsistic but it is always about me. I don’t want to learn songs from a song book because those are other people’s songs. I want my own.

Lastly, as per usual I noticed what a freak I am. There was a nice thread, which I didn’t taint with my presence, about whether a person should get a Kamaka or a Koaloha. The advice centered around sampling the ukuleles or getting sound files or getting the clerks to play them over the phone. That all seems silly to me. Ukuleles are ukuleles. You know what they sound like. They’re ukuleles. Flip a coin and buy one of these two exquisite brands. Then, over time, bond with the one you chose. That is why I don’t play ukuleles even when I am at a music store. It takes time to snuggle up to the instrument. I would need to take months at the music store to come to the conclusion. Therefore I usually just go to the store, point to the one I want, and have the techs set it up so that I can take it home and start the process. I have had my Yorkie about six months and I am now getting to the point where I feel I couldn’t live without it and that playing something else would be like an awkward adulterous affair in which I clumsily run my fingers over a body that I am not familiar or comfortable with. But, as John Lennon said, whatever gets you through the night is alright.
 
5. As for progressions, I have been hovering around the harmonic minor harmonization. I’ve been experimenting with different chordal qualities without much luck.

Minor scales harmonization is certainly varied. And I am quite a newbie. Natural minor scale has all the same chords as the relative major.
Then what scale a tune follows is another question, and harmonic and melodic minors have their own set of chords.

Here is anyways shown what they are:
https://www.musilosophy.com/chord-charts.htm

If we look at harmonic minor the first scale should be D min, but the notes are I think fine.

Easiest for me always to look at Amin scales to notice the differences in minor scale accidentals. The first degree chord is written Amj7 and the more standard naming to me is to use AmMaj7. The other degrees use standard namings, except I wonder about the fifth degree where E7 should suffice when these are 4 note chords.
 
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Hey Jarmo, that's a nice web page. I figured out the harmonization myself, but this page would have saved me a lot of time. And I agree with the E7. The E7b9 is just too much. A favorite progression of mine in the harmonic minor is i, V, iv. Since I'm working in E, that's E minor, B7, Am7. If I change the V to a B7b9, it doesn't sound very good. Going from the E minor to the B7b9 sounds okay, but to follow that up with an Am7 sounds disappointing and inappropriate. Once you commit to a really fancy chord like a 7b9, you have to make the rest of the chords fancy or they don't seem to match.
 
I've been thinking all night about how I don't really like the Fremont strings. They have a bit too much tension for my taste. They make my ukulele sound bright and resonant. I know most people would find that a virtue, but I prefer a muddier sound for my pentatonic stuff.

So I was ready to not like these Fremont strings, but when I tuned the Yorkie up, I found I could bend the strings tolerably well and that I didn't mind the ringing tone as much as I thought I would.

I think I can get used to it.

However, I will probably get a Low G concert string set from Fremont, if I go with that brand in six month's time. I do have a set of Living Water strings in that variety (Low G concert), but I don't like the clear strings visually.
 
In my ukulele time today I was messing around with the idea of trying to incorporate fancy chords into my work.

I took what is, for me, the kernel of the harmonic minor progression: E minor, B7, A minor, and I was trying to spice things up a little bit.

I had already tried inserting a dom7b9 into the middle of that sequence and I didn’t like the flow of things because it went from normal to fancy back to normal. It was incongruous.

I had a little more success with putting the fancy chord at the end. I conceived of a double turnaround of sorts. One basic turnaround is the chromatic movement from the IV to the V, the V of course creating the need for the resolution back to the root.

So after doing the usual Em/B7/Am, I quickly slid up to the B on the G string and formed the dom7b9 barre chord which fortunately has its root on the G string. Then I just walked the chord down in triplets to the second fret where I played Am. This was essentially going from the V to the IV. Then I went chromatically back up to the B: Am, A#m, Bm. From there I just went back to the root and started again.

This worked for my ear because I usually like a big finish to a progression. I typically will do something like a diminished F#, but the dom7b9 served the same general purpose of creating tension.

As a variation on the above I did a few things. First of all, sometimes I would start off the turnaround sequence by sliding up to the C7b9, since the C major is part of his harmonization being the flatted sixth.

Also, for no good reason whatsoever, I tend to like D major even though it isn’t part of the key. I usually insert it around the A minor. It is curious to contemplate why something like the D major fits in at all. I think it works because it is so normal that it is different. This harmonization lends itself to sounds that are off the beaten path. There are augmented chords and diminished chords. So D major fits the vibe by being weird in its unweirdness. A good analogy is me. I tend to stick out like a sore thumb. When everyone is trying so hard to be different with their tattoos, their piercings, their tattered second-hand clothes, being normal is the only true way to be alternative when being alternative is the new norm. I show up in a grey suit and and a black homburg hat (maybe with a burgundy waist coat for a little something extra) and my traditional haberdashery sets me apart from the sea of homogenized alternativity.

I think the D major works in a similar fashion. All the other chords set this expectation of otherness. It is as if the G+ and the E minor maj7 and the F# diminished are saying look at us; what are you going to do to compete with us? They are expecting something like a D sus4 #11, but then I drop in the most normal chord and nothing could be more unexpected and their jaws drop.
 
To familiarize myself with the upper frets, I have been focusing on the B on the 11th of the C string. I had been using the B mixolydian, but I thought that I would vary things a tad with one of my favorite scales, the Gypsy scale. This was one of several scales I copied down from a Swedish heavy metal band's website back in the 90's. If you make B the tonic, then the scale goes:

B C D# E F# G A# B

The thing that is cool about this scale is its intervals. It alternates between a half-step interval and a step and a half interval. It regularly goes back and forth. Because of this, it doesn't really sound like a scale. It sounds, to me, like the kind of music you hear in movies playing in the background when the scene is a sultan's harem. The upshot of that is you can just play the scale and it sounds like a melody. Most scales aren't musical; they sound like you're playing a scale. With the gypsy, you can play in three octaves from the B on the 4th fret all the way up to the B on the 14th fret (assuming a linear tuning, of course)
 
With people on vacation and people quitting, work was bad this week. However, now it is time for drinking and playing. I received the new Daniel Ward book which promises much. I think it has a great deal to offer in technical aspects. What I like about his books is that they lend themselves to self-improvement. Other books teach you how to play a song. Daniel Ward's book teaches how to make music. You can stick to playing the songs in the book, if that's your thing. But his books, at least for me, open up vistas where I can visualize using stuff from the book in my own music. Now I will add this book to my sources of guilt for not exploiting them for all they're worth. I will get to it, but right now I am focusing on other things. Or perhaps that's just my excuse. Maybe I'm just afraid of starting something new. I say this because instead of sitting down with his book, I just did something more in my comfort zone: I was improvising using a Dorian harmonization.

As I was wanking around, I stumbled upon a progression that was very evocative of an old T. Rex song. The chords were all in the Dorian harmonization, but I think it would be misleading to call this progression Dorian. It was

D maj
B min
G maj
A maj

As you may readily see, those chords, although they do come from the Dorian, they are also the I vi V IV progression in D, the most common progression in the world.

I watched some great 70's rock, paying special attention to where on the fretboard they were soloing. I wasn't really concerned with what they were playing and I could have muted the sound altogether for my purpose. So I watched Judas Priest from the Sad Wings of Destiny era watched what neighborhoods they were visiting on the fret board. Then I wound up my metronome and played some improv jumping around like I remembered the band had done. It actually worked well. I know how to play all the areas of the fret board, but I don't necessarily have the aesthetic skill and discretion to move around to create punctuated phrases that have crescendos and lulls.
 
This might interest you in hearing. It is based on a melodic minor scale. And I don’t know but probably he is using natural minor scale too. And using some mode of it that he calls lydian augmented. Dark side of major by Rick Beato
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7D8JMO14Ig

He has put input from keyboard to some computer program and orchestrated it. The result is something that I might like hear in some spooky film, but can of course go overhead to most viewers. Just movie musics are many times interesting. And shows we can make musical sounding stuff with any scale.

While you listen to the nice driving scenery, after that he explains the chords behind it. They are wierd sort of.

I like your thread and always read it. Most times I don’t understand much, but that is no problem to me. Makes much difference to UAS syndrom or social stuff most here are just interested :)

Myself I usually just play cowboy chords for popular finnish and international songs. Just major, major and their dominant seventh chords, them I know all. And of course also the diminshed 7th chords that is often marked with asterix symbol too. Needs just know 3 chords that cover all.

Minor 6 chords are common too, but anything augmented or m7b5, sus(7) etc. and then I’m in trouble. I can’t sight read them. And have to look the best option in ukebuddy site.

I like jazz too a lot, but to me it is all about feeling and I can’t play solos analysing them at all, just by the feel. Or for heavens sake play chords on the run. Some say they play jazz in ukulele, but I sort of doubt they have instead learned some tunes and their chords by heart. Or the real jazz cats are just wierdly genious, if they just improvise chords on the fly.
 
You're dead right, Jarmo_S - there is a world of difference between playing jazz and sounding as though you are playing jazz.

John Colter.

ps. I read somewhere that a highly regarded jazzer once said that if you play a bum note, you should do it again soon after, with emphasis. It leads people to think it was intentional and/or humorous. Probably Charlie Mingus.:)
 
I have been sorely tempted to call myself a jazz player because I think I fulfill the improvisational spirit of jazz. On the other hand, I am no Thelonious Monk in terms of erudition and I don't play standards. I try to think of how someone else would perceive me if they walked by as I was playing on my porch. Would they go, 'that guy's playing some jazz.' I don't think they would. So I don't really have a label to taxonomically differentiate myself. I have heard the terms of Root Music or Americana. I like those terms...well, I like the first one; the second one is a bit jingoistic. I think the implication of Roots Music embodies what I do, since I like to wank about with pentatonic scales and modes, which are the stripped down elements, or roots, of western music. The only problem with saying that I play Roots Music is that not many people would understand what that means and what is the point of labeling yourself with a label which no one acknowledges.

But I suppose life is good when all I have to bemoan is whether to call myself a bluesman, a jazz player, or a Roots musician.
 
I made a bit of a commitment and I started practicing Daniel Ward's first Melodic meditation for ukulele. It is written for high G, so I am playing my Kamaka more. The melodic meditation is going well...as it should! Everything is written down; all you do is follow the directions. So that isn't hard. In fact, a monkey could do it. The goal is to do it flawlessly and then to do it flawlessly with some kind of feeling. I'll practice that a little bit, but I can't do too much of it because it tends to suck the marrow from my soul (or whatever else is at the center of the soul).

Since I'm playing the Kamaka, I am also using it to do more creative things. I've been playing around with something akin to chord melodies. I've been playing a progression in which each chord uses a lower note on the A string. In other words, it is a progression in which each successive chord chromatically descends on the A string by a half-step. For example going from D7 to G to Gm to D.

There is currently a large thread which is tantamount to a circle jerk over the wonders of the high G. I will here employ the figure of the praeteritio and not complain how the high G makes everything sound like elevator music. Instead I am just going to lament how with the high G, 25% of my notes are gone. Basically, with high G, the G string becomes dead to me. However, I am trying to look at it as an opportunity to do more with less. So I've been playing around, mixing major and minor pentatonics with modes, of course focusing on B and E which are the pivot notes that occur in both forms of the pentatonic. That B is a wonderful thing. I've started to notice where it is on the fret board. I gravitate toward it because you can either resolve it back to E or move forward into something else.
 
well, tomorrow Daniel Ward is scheduled to upload supporting videos for his Melodic Meditations book. It will be interesting to see if my accentuation and tempo is on point or not. But, my goodness, it is abject drudgery. I know that for 99% of the people, this is what music is: getting the chord charts, notation, and strum pattern and mimicking the model to a T. However I am rather uninspired.

To offset that lack of licence and creativity I have been messing around with combining major and minor pentatonics. I have been sticking with my Kamaka, so I'm only playing the shapes on the first three strings. To keep it simple I started with the tonic and dominant shapes since they are rooted in E and B, and E and B are also notes in the major pentatonic.

At first I was just just playing the shapes paratactically--ascending in the minor and then descending in the major. It was pretty cool but obviously has limitations. So what I am doing now is trying to play them syntactically. I haven't worked with out completely. What I'm currently trying to do is figure out which intervals sound good. For example, if I'm in the minor pentatonic and play a G, where can I go? What note in the major pentatonic will sound good next to the G? A C#? An F#? I'm still figuring it out. And then do I go right back to the minor pentatonic or do I linger a bit in the major? That's the kind of thing that keeps me up at night and that's what I call music and what I enjoy doing. However, I'm still going to suffer through the regimen of the melodic meditation book because it is probably good for my soul or something. Seriously though, the reason I like Daniel Ward's books is that the skills transfer. All that fingerpicking is going to be germane to my own playing.
 
I have a luthier job to do. The neck came off my cigar box guitar. It was glued to the top of the cigar box. It may be excessive, but I'm just going to screw the neck to the cigar box. I have all lengths of drywall screws and I think they'll do the trick. For some reason, I am currently lacking the gumption to do it now. However, I'll do it soon. I have nothing to lose. If I somehow screw things up, the cigar box will be lost to me as it now currently is.

I spent today doing something fun. I have been translating words into music. One of the many things I respect about the pentatonic scale is that it lends itself to the human voice very well. Here's what I've been doing:

1. Come up with a simple phrase. For some reason all my phrases tend to be negative. Stuff like "I hate you so much" or "I wish you would die."
2. Say the phrases naturally, but with your lips sealed. Doing so renders the phrase into a hum. If you can hear the hum, you can play the hum.

This is a good way to add some lyricism to your playing. A nice way of linking up these lyrics is to engage in questions and answers. Questions tend to ascend in pitch whereas answers descend. This could be a useful way to link up to phrases. Such as:

Q: "Why don't you shove it up your butt?"
A: "Oh! I suppose you would like that very much."

That's a good one, if I must say so. I think what makes that one nice is that there are more than five syllables in the phrases, so that it will be necessary to use more than one shape to complete it. I'll work on that, I think.
 
I've been up all night playing around. It is now 7 a.m., the sun is up, and I reluctantly have to go to bed. First I have to make a good post-ukulele feeding. I'll make some huevos rancheros.

1. Instead of a corn tortilla (you should never use flour tortillas, unless you're also having a pumpkin spice latte) I will make a farinata (4 oz. garbanzo flour & 5 oz. of water and olive oil)
2. top with two runny eggs
3. top with beans. Right now I only have some Dominican red beans and rice. I'll add some gorgonzola cheese as well as some Da Bomb (23000 Scovilles)
4. top with red salsa and green salsa
 
I've had an opportunity to listen to the companion recordings to Daniel Ward's Melodic Meditations and it is faster than I thought. And he plays with more touch. I've noticed the same thing with Sam Muir's playing. We are so used to banging out those chords but we seldom play softly. For me, it seems to be an issue of being comfortable and confident. I'm more concerned with getting the note out that I don't think about its articulation. So I'm going to need to practice more until it feels good and then I can elect to play it softer. To complicate matters slightly I am trying to re-adjust my picking. I have the tendency to use my first two fingers in plucking...kind of like the picado style without the speed or precision. I am trying to not do that and use PPIM fingering. I use PPIM if I'm doing some pattern picking like Travis picking. I'm trying to force myself to use PPIM to pick because I fancy that it will be useful with the more complicated meditations. Right now it is very awkward to restrict the middle finger to the A string, the index finger to the E string and the thumb to the C string when playing the descending C major scale that makes up this meditation. I could play it as fast as I wanted if I only used my index finger as is my wont, but I am going to try to stay disciplined.
 
Since there's been mention of "proper" instruments, I have been ruminating or ratiocinating or whatever R-word. Well...not any. I once read in an Attic comedy the verb radizesthai which signifies punishing an adulterer by sodomizing him with a freshly grated horseradish. Anyway, I've been thinking and what I notice as a difference between proper instruments and the ukulele is a sense of community. When I played proper instruments, there was a systematic way of approaching music which was a common bond between everyone who undertook the task. It was a shared experience. Everyone who made the commitment to music did basically the same thing. I don't get that with the ukulele. With the ukulele you have people who only learn three chords (and go on to win nationally televised talent contents) and you have people who do due diligence with the instrument. On one hand it is good to democratize music so that anyone can play, but it makes the ukulele world seem fragmented. I've gone to one regional ukulele workshop and it'll be my last because it seemed like its objective was how to strum better. That's really not what I want. I want to have a deeper understanding of my instrument. Anyway...that lack of a centralized culture is what I feel is the difference between traditionally proper instruments and the ukulele. There's nothing that prevents the ukulele from being a proper instrument in and of itself. I guess I should look at the silver lining. At least it is easy to impress people with the ukulele since they de-value it. I have 80 notes to choose from on my ukuleles and people are floored when I can pick seven from that selection and play a scale.

Speaking of scales, I have been spottily practicing my Daniel Ward melodic meditation. It is in C, which is something I never play in because it uses open strings (at least in re-entrant tuning) and I hate open strings. I cannot control them or bend them, and those open strings disrupt the finger pattern I have memorized. I love playing everything from C# maj on the first fret to E on the sixteenth. But I always avoid that C maj with the open C, E, and A strings. But now all that has changed and I have to get over it. So that is taking some practice. I hardly even acknowledge it as the C major scale. It seems more like individual notes since the nut cuts off the top of my scale.

And I am recanting. I previously stated that I was going to force myself to use my PPIM formation to play this scale. However I don't see any reason for doing so any more. I use PPIM for pattern picking and I use my index for melody plucking. Life is hard; why make it harder? When I get to something harder, where there's double-stop pinching and patterns, I'll use my PPIM. But on this first meditation there simply isn't a justification.
 
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That's a strange photograph of me jamming around a B mixolydian on my Yorkie. It is strange because of the angle and because it looks like it is daytime. However the time was actually two or three hours before sunrise.
 
It has been a while since I updated. The main thing I have been doing is practicing m7 chords. I watched a video or two by Brian Liu. The videos are very remedial jazz tutorials. So it wasn't anything new, but for some reason it resonated this time around. And I decided to practice with those m7 shapes. I know four and each one has the root note on a different note. This is a great way to learn individual notes since you have to know where the notes are in order to play the chord. The shapes I use are

1. G string root (Gm7)
2. C string root (Dm7)
3. E string root (Fm7)
4. A string root (Bbm7)

minor 7s are very important at least in my mind. They are fun to play because they are silky and make it sound like you know how to play jazz. To me the major and minor triad and the major and minor 7 chords are the nucleus of sound. And I would say that they are all a person needs. Of course music is more than necessity, but if I were stuck on a desert island and could only take four chord qualities with me, those would be the ones.
 
I've been working towards perfecting Daniel Ward's "Melodic Meditation in C." I can play it, but I think I still want to make it tighter. My issue is the chords. I am basically a finger-stylist, so that the melody is a no-brainer to me. However, the chords are clumsy for me because I am not and never have been an avid strummer. We all have our blind spots, I suppose.

Since I have been working with Daniel Ward's chord melodies, I decided to make one of my own. So I got the sheet music for "Gloomy Sunday" and I transposed it to C minor so that even my Kamaka, disadvantaged as it is with the re-entrant tuning, can play it. My plan is to get the melody under my belt and then insert the chords. It is interesting how I know just where to put a chord. I suppose I have heard so many songs that I know where the chord should fall. Maybe there's some very simple music theory tenet which tells you where to put the chord in a measure, but I just go by feel.

I have been playing my Kamaka lately. It is by design my strummer ukulele and accordingly its strings are tuned tighter. That's good for buzz-free chording and a bit more of that bell-chime. However I am lonesome for my Yorkie. I really have a soft spot for its loose strings and muddy articulation (not to mention being able to use all four strings). So I'm probably going to lay off the Daniel Ward stuff for a spell and return to my linear Yorkie and combine some major and minor pentatonics and continue my study of the upper frets.
 
ripock>> I have spent this morning reading a number of your posts in this [long] thread and find your comments, esp about what you are currently practicing to be enlightening. I am, I guess, an advanced beginner??? and much of what you talk ablut is frankly beyond me, certainly in ability but also in terms of music theory, but that is ok because learning occurs best if something is just out of your grasp.
Anyway, because I have also been building a few ukes, as well as learning to play, this comment caught my attention:
<quote>Lastly, as per usual I noticed what a freak I am. There was a nice thread, which I didn’t taint with my presence, about whether a person should get a Kamaka or a Koaloha. The advice centered around sampling the ukuleles or getting sound files or getting the clerks to play them over the phone. That all seems silly to me. Ukuleles are ukuleles. You know what they sound like. They’re ukuleles. Flip a coin and buy one of these two exquisite brands. Then, over time, bond with the one you chose. That is why I don’t play ukuleles even when I am at a music store. It takes time to snuggle up to the instrument. I would need to take months at the music store to come to the conclusion. Therefore I usually just go to the store, point to the one I want, and have the techs set it up so that I can take it home and start the process. I have had my Yorkie about six months and I am now getting to the point where I feel I couldn’t live without it and that playing something else would be like an awkward adulterous affair in which I clumsily run my fingers over a body that I am not familiar or comfortable with. But, as John Lennon said, whatever gets you through the night is alright. </quote>
I have spent time at music stores picking up various ukes and playing them, but have found enormous differences in quality of sound, even among the same make and model. It seems that you are inferring that the major differences have to do with the setups and not the instruments themeselves? But I guess you are only referring to ukes of 'these exquisite brands'.
 
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