Jim Hanks
Well-known member
These have been posted here before so I won't go into too much detail on the uke itself. As some have written, whaddya want for $36? Well, basically I wanted a cheap 19" (-ish - I think it is 19.5") scale uke that I could do some odd string experiments on without surgerizing my good ukes. I almost bought Nickie's Harmony bari, but I think it's for the best all around that didn't pan out.
On the "cons", the fretboard is pretty rough on the edges, the nut is slanted forward and has gaps around it, the tuners are kinda gritty, and the intonation is pretty bad.
But on the "pros", the action doesn't feel that bad, the body is pretty cleanly done, the neck seems straight, and the geared tuners do work.
The stock strings are - curious. I think they are nylon classical guitar strings. The 3rd and 4th are wound as is fairly typical of DGBE baritone sets, but I'm afraid to crank them up anywhere close to DGBE. The strings were extremely flat out of the box - the 4th string was somewhere around A2 - but not that loose. I think a low GCEA tuning (i.e. octave lower than tenor low G) would work pretty well with these strings. As I started turning up the 4th, by the time I got near C3, it was already tighter than I like, so I backed it off to Bb2. Tuning the rest of the strings up from there, they all felt pretty good, yielding a linear Eb tuning! How does that sound? See the video below to find out.
Now, one thing I wanted to try on this uke was the Fremont dGBE tenor string set. I bought this to put on one of my tenors but the 3rd string seems too thick to fit the nut slot on either the Iriguchi or Imua and I don't want to muck with them. It would fit the slot on my Ono bari but it sounds too good linear to "waste" it on reentrant. My hope is that the set will do well at cFAD on the longer scale or even a step lower for reentrant Eb. How ironic that the
stock strings come in at linear Eb which I've never heard of.
But I think I'm going to try some different linear strings first. I have some extra Southcoast LL-NW strings that are supposed to give GCEA (linear C) on this scale, but maybe I'll try to stop at FBbDG(linear Bb) or F#BD#G#(linear B).
On the "cons", the fretboard is pretty rough on the edges, the nut is slanted forward and has gaps around it, the tuners are kinda gritty, and the intonation is pretty bad.
But on the "pros", the action doesn't feel that bad, the body is pretty cleanly done, the neck seems straight, and the geared tuners do work.
The stock strings are - curious. I think they are nylon classical guitar strings. The 3rd and 4th are wound as is fairly typical of DGBE baritone sets, but I'm afraid to crank them up anywhere close to DGBE. The strings were extremely flat out of the box - the 4th string was somewhere around A2 - but not that loose. I think a low GCEA tuning (i.e. octave lower than tenor low G) would work pretty well with these strings. As I started turning up the 4th, by the time I got near C3, it was already tighter than I like, so I backed it off to Bb2. Tuning the rest of the strings up from there, they all felt pretty good, yielding a linear Eb tuning! How does that sound? See the video below to find out.
Now, one thing I wanted to try on this uke was the Fremont dGBE tenor string set. I bought this to put on one of my tenors but the 3rd string seems too thick to fit the nut slot on either the Iriguchi or Imua and I don't want to muck with them. It would fit the slot on my Ono bari but it sounds too good linear to "waste" it on reentrant. My hope is that the set will do well at cFAD on the longer scale or even a step lower for reentrant Eb. How ironic that the
stock strings come in at linear Eb which I've never heard of.
But I think I'm going to try some different linear strings first. I have some extra Southcoast LL-NW strings that are supposed to give GCEA (linear C) on this scale, but maybe I'll try to stop at FBbDG(linear Bb) or F#BD#G#(linear B).