Strings for a pocket Ukulele and GCEA tuning

I recently purchased a cheap pocket ukulele to keep at my desk or throw in my bag if I'm heading to a friends house. I wanted to tune it to GCEA like my Soprano and my Concert uke, but tuning this low is not practical with the strings that came on it (I think they're standard Soprano strings).

I came across the Aquila 94U strings: http://omegamusic.co.uk/buy/aquila-aq-94u-soprano-piccolo-mini-iuke-ukulele-strings

According to the description these should allow me to tune my pocket Uke to GCEA, but an octave higher. Is it that simple? If I use these strings tuned to GCEA will I be able to use the same chords and play along with any other Uke tuned to GCEA?

Thanks for the help. I'm still pretty new to the Uke, but quickly becoming obsessed.

The Aquila 94Us are really high. If you google "Aquila 94U" there are a couple youtube videos which use these strings and you can hear how high they sound. If that sound is acceptable, then you have an easy solution.

It can take some experimenting to find what you want, but the pocket uke can be tuned to almost anything. I just had my Kala pocket uke at GDAE (high-G) and just retuned it to CGDA (high-C) to match fairly close to my tenor guitar. The strings were some low-cost GCEAs that I moved around to meet the patterns I wanted and tuned accordingly.

The strings, no matter how I tuned the uke, took a couple days to stabilize, requiring a lot of retuning to get them where I wanted, and then it seemed another day or so before they sounded as I thought they should. So, patienceis a virtue.

And GCEA chords are fingered the same regardless of the instrument if that's the tuning you use.

Just checked out a youtube video. The 94U strings sound very high pitched. I guess as a beginner my main concern is being able to pick up the pocket uke and play along with other instruments with the chords I already know on my Soprano/Concert ukes that are tuned to GCEA. I'm starting to feel like I'm better off with regular strings on my pocket uke.

The big issue is scale length. What is it? Distance from the face of the string nut to the middle of the saddle...

We were hanging out with Heidi Swedberg over the weekend, and she had a pocket/high octave/sopranino uke that kept breaking strings. The scale on that started at the 5th fret of a normal soprano uke. I suspect that really small high tensile fluorocarbon fishing line appropriately gauged would work.

The scale length is 11". The current strings don't seem overly high tension.

This is a related question, or just an expounding of the same question. Tuning our new pocket uke to GCEA slackens the strings quite a bit. I feel that putting thicker strings will solve the problem. Is this solution actually feasible?

i put worth CHs on my rubin sopranino. they are serviceable. i have a noodling vid with those strings at gcea.

Check out these two threads I started

http://forum.ukuleleunderground.com/showthread.php?102282-Eye-candy-my-Small-collection-literally!


http://forum.ukuleleunderground.com/showthread.php?102319-IUke-and-BeatBuddy-Pedal-Demonstration-Serenade-for-Raye-amp-Europa

On an Argapa Piccolo, I've just put a stock set of Soprano budget fluorocarbons to try and maintain conventional GCEA. The C is only just enough tension, but when settled, seems still readily playable. Any other users with anything to report? I'm presuming that string girth is allowing higher tension per scale length, but does that in theory increase the difficulty of fretting, or improve it? I've also just adopted the lightweight plastic 6:1 planetary tuners. They really help with string setting at so short a scale length.