Advice: check size, not scale length + a shout out to the Blue Star Konablaster

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Something very basic occurred to me after nearly 3 years of online uke shopping. Something that other people should know in order to save themselves trouble.

In many uke specifications, you will see a note about the scale length, but not about the length of the uke itself. For me, this lead to a habit of assuming a correspondence between the scale length and the body size - ie that all ukes of a certain scale length all have roughly the same sized body.

But today I woke up and wondered what I'd find if I measured all of my ukes from the nut to the end of the body (I chose the nut as the endpoint because it's relevant to how a uke fits in your arms, and the size of the headstock is irrelevant to how a uke fits in your arms).

What I discovered was surprising. I have two baritones, a tenor, and a concert. One baritone (a Lanikai) had a significantly longer nut-butt distance than the other, despite them appearing to be the same size.

More significantly, the concert was not much smaller than the smaller baritone, and the tenor was actually smaller than the concert.

I then turned my attention to an instrument that I'd been thinking of getting for a long time: the Blue Star Konablaster baritone. One thing about it had turned me off for a long time: the scale. It has a 22" scale. That's significantly longer than any baritone, and is firmly in guitar territory (see: Fender Mustang, as well as many student guitars).

I didn't want to adjust to that - the whole appeal of baritones to me is that they feel like baritone ukes, not like guitars.

But I emailed Bruce at Blue Star Guitars and asked him how long the baritone Konablaster was from nut to end. He responded soon after and told me that it was 24 1/4 inches.

Guess what? That's about the same size as a normal baritone. So the seemingly guitar-sized, 22" scaled konablaster is actually about the same size as a typical 20" scaled baritone uke.

So what does this mean? This means several things:

1) If you haven't measured your favorite ukes, measure them

2) If you ever order a custom instrument, talk about the distance from the nut to the end, not just the scale length

3) I'm getting a bad-ass customized Blue Star baritone with a single-coil pickup from bad-ass Bruce.
 
3) I'm getting a bad-ass customized Blue Star baritone with a single-coil pickup from bad-ass Bruce.

First of all, congrats on joining the enlightened ranks of Konablaster owners. :p FWIW, I guess you know what you want in terms of pickups, but I didn't, so I had Bruce give me a humbucker with coil splitter so I can get the single coil sound when I want. Just throwing that out there in case you hadn't considered it. You can also get shorter scales with a customized one (mine is 19") if you want. I didn't consider body size but definitely did not want a scale length longer than that. I'm looking forward to seeing your KB, but don't even ask Bruce for an early look. I did and he wouldn't do it as it would spoil the surprise of opening the box for the first time. :)
 
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