13down
Well-known member
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.
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.