Octave Ukulele

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pt66

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I have been reading and posting about Rick Turners Eagle Octave Ukulele. About there years ago I had a idea for a similar instrument. Like many of you I restrung my baritone to octave tuning and tried it out. I liked what I heard but felt a bigger body and longer string length would improve the sound. I also thought I would call it a "Contra Uke". I have finally gotten around to the build. The sides are cherry and the back is cherry with a wide walnut center strip (kind of Martin D35 ish). The top is spruce and braced like a classical guitar. It is 13 inches across the lower bout with a 22 1/4 inch scale. Rosewood fingerboard and bridge. I will try to post pictures soon.
 
Tenor guitar to the best of my knowlege are always steel strings. But, yes you could tune a tenor guitar this way. If you put nylon strings on a tenor guitar you would have to recut the nut and maybe move the saddle.
 
For years many people have tuned tenor guitars like baritone ukes. Now people are putting steel strings on baritone ukes. does that make them short scale tenor guitars? What are the defining characteristics of any instrument? how do we define an instrument? By it's tuning or by it's construction (size, shape, number of strings)? What are the rules?
 
pt66 said:
For years many people have tuned tenor guitars like baritone ukes. Now people are putting steel strings on baritone ukes. does that make them short scale tenor guitars? What are the defining characteristics of any instrument? how do we define an instrument? By it's tuning or by it's construction (size, shape, number of strings)? What are the rules?
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My question was more that the scale of your contra uke and a tenor guitar are very similar, and the size is a bit bigger than a baritone, closer to a tenor. That was where my initial curiosity came from more than anything else.
 
There's LOTS and LOTS of goodness to be had in dropping down an octave...

I have a solid-body electric classical nylon string guitar made by Antonia Hermosa, the AH-50, which is similar to the Godin Multiac Nylon (but at 1/4 the price), which I have just restrung with extra hard tension nylon classical guitar strings, and tuned DOWN from EADGBE to ADGCEA, and as such it is similar to a BARITONE guitar which can be tuned down to B or A tuning like this, however BARITONE guitars are typically steel-string electric only as far as I can tell.

WHY did I do this??? Because my guitalele is tuned in the same octave as the uke, but with 2 bass strings, as ADGCEA, and I wanted to have a lower-bass type tone to accompany my songwriting and recording without having to remap my brain to the EADGBE and be able to use the same chord shapes and scale patterns.

Yes, the strings are a little floppy, but very playable at 24.75" scale length, and the sound is deep and sweet, and like nothing I've ever heard before.

Kind of how the cello is to the violin.

I also have a full 34" long scale electric bass, which I find very uncomfortable to play now, since playing the ukuele as my primary instrument for the past year. So I will probably just sell the bass at some point, and replace it with a U-Bass type instrument.
 
Booli said:
There's LOTS and LOTS of goodness to be had in dropping down an octave...
Click to expand...

No argument here; I regularly play a 6 string bass and do a lot of chordal work on it, even with the low B, so I know all about it.
 
The scale is longer then a baritone because I wanted to tune it lower. In my thinking to put heavier strings on a baritone to get to a lower sound works but building an instrument with a biger body works better. To keep things in proportion you need a longer scale.
 
By the way, Rick is calling these an "octave ukulele" and the use of the term "the eagle" refers specifically to Jay's custom octave ukulele as he had an incredible eagle inlay in the headstock.

I played Jay's octave ukulele when he got it and it is really quite special. When Jay and I played together, Jay playing his octave ukulele and I was playing re-entrant regular gCEA, the balance between the two instruments was wonderful.
 
One Bad Monkey said:
Just out of curiosity, how is the contra uke different from just a tenor guitar with a different tuning?
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Similar scale, but I tune my tenors DGBE, just like my baritone ukes. Called the "Chicago" tuning.
 
ichadwick said:
Similar scale, but I tune my tenors DGBE, just like my baritone ukes. Called the "Chicago" tuning.
Click to expand...

Which was my whole point. What is the difference then, between a tenor guitar with Chicago tuning, and this Contra Uke that has a very similar scale, body size and tuning? Just the steel strings on the tenor as opposed to the more classical strings on the uke?

I'm genuinely curious.
 
Here are a couple of observations from another recent thread in which this issue came up:

mds725 said:
There have been a lot of discussions in this forum, and some controversy, about when an ukulele stops being an ukulele and starts being another instrument. I suppose that under an "ukuleles ARE sopranos" philosophy, any non-soprano would be a guitar, just with different tuning, or would a tenor have to be tuned DGBE instead of CGEA to become a guitar? What characteristics are essential to an ukulele being an ukulele - size, body shape, tuning, what the strings are made of?

I have two Compass Rose jumbo baritones, one of which has steel strings, and when I picked them up from Rick Turner, he even said that he thought the steel string jumbo baritone was pretty much a steel string tenor guitar. Is one of my jumbo baritones an ukulele because it's tuned GCEA and the other one a guitar because it's tuned DGBE, which is the tuning of the top four strings of a guitar? Or is it the fact that one has steel strings that makes the steel string jumbo tenor not an ukulele? Or are they both not ukuleles because they both have jumbo shaped bodies and/or a baritone scale length? I have a steel string tenor ukulele that's tuned GCEA. Would it be a cavaquinho if it was tuned differently, it is it a cavaquinho because it has steel strings? I don't think it matters. My jumbo baritones are ukuleles because that's what the builder says they are. Personally, I think that ukuleles have a more percussive sound to them than guitars do, and my steel string baritone CR sounds more percussive to me than my Blueridge steel string tenor guitar does. (I assume that if I participate in The Seasons of the Ukulele, I'd be complying with the "ukulele must be front and center" rule if I used my steel string jumbo baritone ukulele because the guy who built it calls it an ukulele.)

This controversy is not limited to ukuleles. Is an alto clarinet not a clarinet because it's longer than a "normal" clarinet and has a deeper voice? What about alto, tenor, and baritone saxophones? It turns out that trumpets also come in different sizes, as do drums.

The point for me is that they all make slightly different sounds and they all serve some purpose in making music.
Click to expand...

Rick Turner said:
Is there only one size of saxophone? Clarinet?

In the electric bass world, some forum posters are so weird about what stringed instruments are called (and electric basses were once referred to as "bass guitars") that they won't even fully spell out "guitar"...it's the "g-word" or "g.....".

Yes, the original ukes...and remember that they are not strictly native to Hawaii, rather they are the product of evolution from the Portuguese...were sopranos. And then there came to be two tunings for sopranos. So how many consider a "D" reentrant tuned ukulele to be normal? Or is it a variant? What about a concert uke? And do real ukes have 12 frets to the body or is 14 OK? Do real ukes have fingerboards that are integral with the neck itself...in other words, no glued-on fingerboard? Or is it OK to build them guitar-style with a separate fingerboard? How about fingerboard extensions over the tops?

Are stringed instruments even traditional in Hawaii? No, they are not...unless you allow traditions to have starting points. The Spanish brought guitars to Hawaii at a date that is lost. The Portuguese brought the machete/future ukulele to Hawaii on a date that is actually extremely well defined.

Traditions start with innovations. Instrument designs evolve to suit the music and the musicians. Trying to stop the process is like playing "whack a mole" with your eyes shut.

I call the octave uke an octave uke because it is in alignment with the mandolin tradition (Italian...not far from Spain or Portugal...where our little friend's folks came from). An octave mandolin is tuned one octave below a standard mandolin. I called the steel string baritone uke a baritone uke because it is tuned just like a "normal, modern" baritone uke...in other words, D, G, B, E like the top four strings of a guitar. It is NOT a tenor guitar because to me, a tenor guitar is tuned in 5ths, C, G, D, A, matching the tenor banjo from which it sprung...even though some guitar players "cheat" and tune it like...yes, a baritone uke. Is a taro patch any less of a uke because it has eight strings? What about five and six string ukes? And then there's the tiple...tuned like a uke but with ten steel (and bronze wound) strings...

So I think it's disingenuous to try to put severe limits on our definitions of what a uke is. I try to let the name designation give a good idea of where the instrument fits musically. "Octave uke" says exactly what it is. "Baritone uke" has become a well understood definition of...hah!...a small guitar with the bottom two strings missing! But we understand what it is...unless we're just ornery and don't want to allow anything that can't be defined as a ukulele as would have been made between 1879 and about 1920.
Click to expand...
 
My whole idea was to build an instrument that was tuned lower then a baritone uke and in a tuning that the chords would have the same names as a tenor ukulele. I wanted it to be bigger then a baritone because I felt that if it was lower in pitch it would sound better with a larger body and longer string length. The violin has a family of instruments, the mandolin also. Why not the ukulele?
 
"Why not the ukulele?"...
Bingo...
Exactly...
And totally right on...

So we have...more or less:

Sopranino or pocket uke (and I haven't read any complaints about them...)
Soprano
Concert
Tenor
Baritone
Octave

And, of course, there are variations on them, and there is some overlap with guitar when you get into tenor guitars which can be tuned correctly in 5ths like a tenor banjo :), or like...baritone ukes, or like...octave ukes.

The first instrument I built on the 12" (across lower bout) jumbo body style (as seen and heard elsewhere around here) was actually a mando guitar with a fanned fretboard, and it was an archtop. Six strings tuned in 5ths...F, C, G, D, A, E, so the open strings covered the range from the "F" of a guitar...1st fret, 6th string, to the high "E" of the 12th fret, 1st string which is the same as the high "E" set on a mandolin. So the top four strings were tuned as a mandolin, the 5th was the C of a mandola, then the 6th was a fifth below that.

BTW, I'm thinking that the bottom four strings in a Savarez yellow label classical guitar set may be the ticket for octave uke. Those are the highest tension Savarez strings. Another interesting set to try would be the bottom four of a Thomastik-Infeld Classic S rope core set...they're a hybrid of nylon and steel. Really interesting strings.
 
Rick Turner said:
. . . . BTW, I'm thinking that the bottom four strings in a Savarez yellow label classical guitar set may be the ticket for octave uke. Those are the highest tension Savarez strings. Another interesting set to try would be the bottom four of a Thomastik-Infeld Classic S rope core set...they're a hybrid of nylon and steel. Really interesting strings.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip about strings! The strings on my Compass Rose Octave Baritone sound great but to me they feel just a bit floppy. i was thinking about looking for strings with higher tension.

By the way, I'm also wondering about putting octave-lower-than-a-tenor-ukulele GCEA steel strings on my steel string Blueridge tenor guitar, which is currently tuned DGBE (Chicago tuning). because it's already braced for steel strings, I was thinking I could use the bottom four strings of a steel string guitar string set, in the same way that the bottom four strings from a nylon string guitar set are currently on my octave lower baritone ukulele.
 
There are many good string tension calculators on the web. I think Stewmac has one. Type in the scale, the size and the pitch and it will tell you the tension. If you do that for the string you have and compare with the strings you are planning to use you can see if the are too heavy or too light.
 
BTW in 2011 I posted this question "Is there such a thing as a steek string baritone uke? Not a tenor guitar but a reel baritone uke." The only reply I got was Southcoastuke saying that REAL baritone ukes do not have steel strings. Was that just one mans opinion?
 
pt66 said:
There are many good string tension calculators on the web. I think Stewmac has one. Type in the scale, the size and the pitch and it will tell you the tension. If you do that for the string you have and compare with the strings you are planning to use you can see if the are too heavy or too light.
Click to expand...

It will only give you accurate measurements for the strings that it has the unit weight for; otherwise, it's all guesswork. And please remember, tension of the string and the feel of the string are NOT completely tied to one another. You can have a string that, on paper, has a high tension but feels very loose when on the instrument.
 
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