who is the low G inventor?

Hello guys,
a few years ago I received a mail from Hawaii.
He was a very elderly ma; he told me that he was the inventor of the Low G set.
In the first time I was a bit suprise and scheptic.
However, after a few hours I was able to recognize in the web an ukulele method of 1950's with his name on!
In there I saw the first mention of the low G set.
so he was really the inventor of the low G set-
amazing.

ah, I am not able to remember who was this man....i lost the mail between thousands of mails that are in my PC.,...
any suggestion?
as I am a scholar in matter of period musical instrument string setup I would like to study the ukulele setups till 1950's
Thanks!
Mimmo

Mimmo, Here's an old thread on this topic. One of the posters says Bill Tapia told him he was using low G in the 20s. I have never seen a method from the 50s in low G. I would be curious to know who wrote it.

http://forum.ukuleleunderground.com...Bill-Tapia-and-Low-G-question&highlight=Tapia

Most such claims fall as a new chorus of an old song....

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OA2leLIsU9I

Could your mail have come from Herb Ohta? He would have been asking about a soprano or possibly concert low g.
He did write a book sharing his techniques.

I have a method Ohta Sr wrote for Kamaka, and it is a high G method. That method is pretty old but probably from the 70s or 80s. Not as far back as the 50s. Maybe he wrote another.

I'm going to take a wild guess here - any chance it was Eddie Kamae?

Hello Mimmo,

Are you sure of your recollection on this? "Low G", or a linear C tuning seems to be an unlikely candidate for a method book in the 50s. It's not so much because no one played linear tunings in those days - brimmer mentions Bill Tapia, for example - but hardly anyone played C tuning, even in reentrant form. Most everything outside the Baritone was commonly in D tuning; neither the Baritone nor the Tenor got much play at all.

Maybe Bill was one of those few, but it's hard to say, as unfortunately people use that term "low G" for linear tuning in any key, and when he was interviewed in his later years, there's no doubt about where he was tuned. It seems just as likely he could have been tuned to a linear D in the early days.

But as for the book itself, one fellow who might know is Ian Chadwick, who possesses (and publishes) the largest collection of vintage Ukulele sheet music and method books you can find. If you're looking for research material, that's a great place to start, and you might want to drop him a line as well to see if he knows of such a beast. You can contact him through the vintageukemusic website.

ubulele said:

The ukulele evolved from the cavaquinho, a Portuguese instrument with four strings and linear tuning; the reentrant 4th was a later adaptation from the rajão, a five-stringed instrument with two reentrant strings. Linear tunings have always been used with the ukulele, even if not so prevalently. Any claims that linear tuning or linear sets were "invented" in the 1950s should be viewed with great skepticism.

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I think you've confused the modern Cavaquinho with what was being played when the Ukulele first came about. Linear tuning on a Cava is a modern variant, and still not as common as the original form. While the original tuning is close to a linear form, it is in fact an open G tuning: d' g' b' d". I've not heard of much true linear tuning throughout the Ukulele's history with the exception of a very few folks like Tapia. Even the original Open form had pretty much died out by around 1920.

Sir Humphrey Low-G.

He even had the tenacity to name the tuning after himself.

southcoastukes said:

Are you sure of your recollection on this? "Low G", or a linear C tuning seems to be an unlikely candidate for a method book in the 50s. It's not so much because no one played linear tunings in those days - brimmer mentions Bill Tapia, for example - but hardly anyone played C tuning, even in reentrant form. Most everything outside the Baritone was commonly in D tuning; neither the Baritone nor the Tenor got much play at all.

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Where is member Jim T. when we need him? I found this old post that asserts otherwise:


Mimmo, it couldn't possibly have been Ernest Kaai's method book that you found? It definitely pre-dates the 1950s but some of these method books stayed in print a long time, maybe with updated covers but not much other change. I've had a few over the years that were clearly published in the 1950s but based on the songs included were probably first published 30 or 40 years earlier.

southcoastukes said:

Hello Mimmo,

Are you sure of your recollection on this? "Low G", or a linear C tuning seems to be an unlikely candidate for a method book in the 50s. It's not so much because no one played linear tunings in those days - brimmer mentions Bill Tapia, for example - but hardly anyone played C tuning, even in reentrant form. Most everything outside the Baritone was commonly in D tuning; neither the Baritone nor the Tenor got much play at all. Maybe Bill was one of those few, but it's hard to say, as unfortunately people use that term "low G" for linear tuning in any key, and when he was interviewed in his later years, there's no doubt about where he was tuned. It seems just as likely he could have been tuned to a linear D in the early days.

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Lyle Ritz recorded his jazz albums of 1957 and 1959 on a ukulele with linear C6-tuning. C6 and D6 never ruled each other out, it's just that D6 became much more dominant between say 1920 and 1960. There's also some amount of logic to it: for piercing live sounds a higher tuning works better, for warmer sounding studio recordings or bedroom music C6 works a bit better.

As for linearity in tuning, perhaps the idea to tune a ukulele that way wasn't new, but given the rise of packaged string sets in the 1950s I think it's probable that the man invented linear tuning ukulele string packages. Though I can't imagine he made a fortune out of it...

Maybe the answer is that linear Low-G was simply influenced by guitar?

What hasn't been mentioned is the "practicality factor" which has influenced the tuning of all stringed instruments - that being what type and gauge of strings happened to be available to the musician.

Musicians are adaptive folk. Give a musician a needing-strings instrument and a bag of loose strings of mixed sizes/gauges, odds-on the musician will configure the instrument with whatever fits, tune it to whatever the strings will tolerate, and then experiment with the results. Whatever the "tuning" is, so be it.

Many of us have a bagfull of tools, miscellaneous unlabeled strings and instrument parts. Sometimes circumstances find us with a popped string on an instrument, so we see what we have that fits and go from there. The end result may be a smile or a frown, but one learns a little more with each experiment.

If one thinks of the "slack key" tuning concept, the origin probably involved a "this is the wrong string, but it's all I've got" situation. Other tuning combinations probably followed the same logic and eventually became "standards."

So, someone may claim to be the "inventor" of a tuning formula, but it seems to me like when a politician or other opportunist claims credit for the efforts of others. That's not to say an "I invented low-G" claimant may not believe their claim is true, but the sheer number of musicians throughout the generations makes such a claim questionable. It's like "who invented the first four-stringed hand-held musical instrument?" We may never know, but here's a tip-of-the-hat to whomever s/he was!

I think this different stringing is a plot from those who make instruments so we need one tuned GCEA-another gCEA- another fCFA and so on......at least I have convinced myself that's why I need several of the same thing. The one which really attracts attention was brought to our attention by Dirk at SOUTHCOAST with the lowered 1st string and 4th; whether gCEa or dGBe. I know he didn't invent it, but he surely popularized it. Thanks Dirk!!

The first song broadcast from Hawaii in 1939 to mainland USA, required a low g, so anyone saying that it of the 50's may claim to have popularized it, but certainly did not create it. What did Arthur Godfrey play as far as size and tuning? I watched him but didn't know of sizes and tunings of ukuleles. I began playing guitar in 1951. My guitar was the size of a baritone. It surely was easy to pack around from 1956 to1960 when I was in the USN. Realizing that a uke is just a capo at the 5th fret of a guitar made the transition very easy.

This is an interesting thread, thank you Mimmo for starting it ----(I get my strings from Curtis Daly and all of my 45personal ukes, and the lines I represent go with AQUILA. thanks for them, also

I went looking for this thread wondering if anyone had found something. Over the weekend I started thinking about it a bit. While the folks on the mainland pretty much all played in D tuning in those years C tuning always did get more play in Hawaii, even if D tuning was dominant there as well. Then throw in the factor of the Baritone – the first Ukulele where Linear tuning was primary – appearing in the late 40s, and all the sudden it starts to sound plausible (not to say Mimmo’s source was unreliable).

A fellow in Hawaii, where C tuning is not so rare, looks at the linear tuning of the new Baritone, and says, why not something like that on a Tenor? As some have suggested (and thanks for the kind words, Cowboy) the “popularizer” might be a better word than “inventor”. But of course without some sort of paper trail, it’s all speculation. Since Ian hasn’t chimed in, here’s a possible avenue to explore, Mimmo.

In the past I’ve gotten great help from both The Bishop Museum in Hawaii and the archives at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Of course, it’s easier if you know the name of the manuscript you’re looking for. But their fees are not that high and what you might ask them is what they would charge to put together a list of all their 50’s Ukulele Method Books,title and author only, or maybe just those published in Hawaii. That way if one of those names or authors rings a bell from your old e-mail, you could go for a copy of the whole document.

Of course nothing beats browsing through those collections on your own. Business expense trip to Hawaii?

Good luck!

ubulele said:

I'm not at all confused. "Linear tuning" doesn't necessarily mean open C6 tuning, simply that the pitches ascend without reentrance. The popular Nunes method of 1915 is in fact based around the linear open G tuning, countering your assertion that this tuning had all but died out by the 20s; and tenors emerged in the 20s—all tuned to reentrant G6?—I hardly think so. From what I've read, although D6 and C6 tunings were most prevalent (at least from the 20s on), the Hawaiians were inventive with their uke tunings, as with their slack-key tunings for guitar, where it's quite common for two players to select different tunings for use together. How could there be such unnatural conformity among ukulele players, with three sizes of instrument available, when there was so much variation among native guitar players, with only one size? It strains credulity.

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Hey Ubu,

Just noticed your post. Let me try to help you out on the “linear” – “reentrant” thing. It’s not an either or situation. There are tunings, like the Machete tuning, that are “neither-nor”.

And as for the “popular” Nunes method, whoever led you to believe that did you no favor. There’s a lot of misinformation out there on the World Wide Web. “Popular” is the last word you’d want to use to describe that Method. Be careful of your sources!