I played guitar for almost fifty years, never got great at it, but competent....
... I've applied myself more to the uke than I did for the previous 20 years on guitar.
My experience is similar to Kohanmike's as per above but for around 37 yrs with guitar...
I am finding music more exciting to play, and to figure out arrangements on uke, whereas on guitar they were too complicated for me to play, or the time investment to master the arrangement was greater than I had available or was willing to invest at the time.
For me right now, the uke has become the primary and focal instrument for my songwriting, and has allowed me to shift my paradigm, and focus in a much more satisfying way with my songwriting.
I dont spend so much time learning other songs that have been previously written by others, since now my time is spent exploring the fretboard in mostly re-entrant tunings, on only 4 strings, which provides me with a more effective and more efficient tool set than on a 6-string guitar.
On guitar I was kind of overwhelmed and found lots of classical, jazz and flamenco playing to be overwhelming. On ukulele, I have a greater level of accomplishment with these styles, and have covered more ground, and growing my ability in 2.5 yrs than I have in all the time I played guitar. Keep in mind, that when I was in high-school, I was a total guitar geek and practiced for at least an hour, every day, and took lessons until it was apparent that my teacher was useless to me, and that I could almost play any song on the radio after hearing it maybe 2-3 times...
I definitely appreciate the time that I spent with learning and playing guitar, and feel that it helped me to approach the ukulele pretty quickly, and for a while re-entrant tuning seemed '
wrong' to my ear coming from guitar, and it felt like I had to un-learn from my 'guitar brain', but
now, a linear tuning seems boring and dull to me, and less appealing than a re-entrant tuning.
Also, when writing music now, it's easier to split the musical parts up across different instruments and frequency ranges. With multi-track recording, I can write a C6 tuned part for a tenor, and a G6 tuned part for a baritone to play counterpoint, and then anchor the low end with my uke bass, ALL without any instruments stepping on the frequencies of the others.
In the past, this would have been 2 guitar parts and an electric bass, and the guitar parts would overlap or get too sonically and harmonically complex, but now I don't have this problem any more.
I also used to sing and play guitar, but due to recent breathing and other health problems this is no longer something that I strive to do (mitigating these issues requires medication that has
side effects much worse than not taking the medication at all), and instead the tenor uke has become my lyrical '
voice', with the baritone being the '
accompaniment' component of the music.
In the end, I feel that I am better able to work within my own limitations, while still being challenged, and
even accomplish the composition of music that is more satisfying to me overall.