Cute Little Guitar

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Person 1: Hey! That's a cute little guitar
Me: Thanks, It's called ooo koo lay lay

Person 2: That's a cute little guitar
Me: Thanks, It's called ooo koo lay lay

Person 3: That's a cute little guitar
Me: Thanks, It's called ooo koo lay lay

Person 4: That's a cute little guitar
Me: Thanks, Yeah it's like a cute little guitar
 
They're not wrong. That is, in essence, what it is - a little guitar, and cute.

What is interesting, to me, is the way guitarists respond to the ukulele. A few years ago, I was playing and singing in a pub, and two fellas showed an interest in my soprano uke. Both were guitar players. I explained that the uke was tuned gCEA (with the 'g' string in the octave above the other three) and thus it was like a guitar capo'd at the fifth fret.

I handed the uke to them and one immediately started strumming some basic chord sequences. He was really delighted, saying he would get himself one ASAP. He handed it to the other bloke, who was an equally competent guitarist, but the second fella found the uke utterly confusing. He couldn't do anything with it.

I guess it depends upon their mental approach to playing the guitar. If you are happy just to play basis "shapes" with your left hand, then the uke will make perfect sense. If you think about chords as collections of notes, and need to know what notes you are playing, and in what key, then it is much more difficult.

I'm a shapes man, myself.

John Colter
 
They're not wrong. That is, in essence, what it is - a little guitar, and cute.

What is interesting, to me, is the way guitarists respond to the ukulele. A few years ago, I was playing and singing in a pub, and two fellas showed an interest in my soprano uke. Both were guitar players. I explained that the uke was tuned gCEA (with the 'g' string in the octave above the other three) and thus it was like a guitar capo'd at the fifth fret.

I handed the uke to them and one immediately started strumming some basic chord sequences. He was really delighted, saying he would get himself one ASAP. He handed it to the other bloke, who was an equally competent guitarist, but the second fella found the uke utterly confusing. He couldn't do anything with it.

I guess it depends upon their mental approach to playing the guitar. If you are happy just to play basis "shapes" with your left hand, then the uke will make perfect sense. If you think about chords as collections of notes, and need to know what notes you are playing, and in what key, then it is much more difficult.

I'm a shapes man, myself.

John Colter

Makes sense to me. I am into shapes, patterns and the starting position (which usually tells me what key I'm in).
 
They're not wrong. That is, in essence, what it is - a little guitar, and cute.

What is interesting, to me, is the way guitarists respond to the ukulele. A few years ago, I was playing and singing in a pub, and two fellas showed an interest in my soprano uke. Both were guitar players. I explained that the uke was tuned gCEA (with the 'g' string in the octave above the other three) and thus it was like a guitar capo'd at the fifth fret.

I handed the uke to them and one immediately started strumming some basic chord sequences. He was really delighted, saying he would get himself one ASAP. He handed it to the other bloke, who was an equally competent guitarist, but the second fella found the uke utterly confusing. He couldn't do anything with it.

I guess it depends upon their mental approach to playing the guitar. If you are happy just to play basis "shapes" with your left hand, then the uke will make perfect sense. If you think about chords as collections of notes, and need to know what notes you are playing, and in what key, then it is much more difficult.

I'm a shapes man, myself.

John Colter

About a decade ago, I was a guitarist who also played banjo, mandolin and mouth harp and dabbled with other instruments but had always thought of ukuleles as toys.
I was at a party and a fellow named David Newland was there with a metal bodied reso-uke. I liked the look and sound of it and David asked me if I'd like to try it. David ended up playing guitar for the rest of the night because I was having so much fun with the uke. Shortly after that, I bought my first ukulele, a Kala concert koa. Soon after I played the uke in the Maple Leaf Champions Jug Band and I was hooked.
David had started a group called The Corktown Uke Club in Toronto and when he moved to Cobourg, the club members gave him a National uke as a gift. He asked me if I'd ike to buy his old reso-uke (a Johnson) and I now own the very ukulele that got me into this "4 strings made of nylon" way of thinking.
Here are my first uke and the reso I got from David.
ukestraps.jpg
 
They're not wrong. That is, in essence, what it is - a little guitar, and cute.

What is interesting, to me, is the way guitarists respond to the ukulele. A few years ago, I was playing and singing in a pub, and two fellas showed an interest in my soprano uke. Both were guitar players. I explained that the uke was tuned gCEA (with the 'g' string in the octave above the other three) and thus it was like a guitar capo'd at the fifth fret.

I handed the uke to them and one immediately started strumming some basic chord sequences. He was really delighted, saying he would get himself one ASAP. He handed it to the other bloke, who was an equally competent guitarist, but the second fella found the uke utterly confusing. He couldn't do anything with it.

I guess it depends upon their mental approach to playing the guitar. If you are happy just to play basis "shapes" with your left hand, then the uke will make perfect sense. If you think about chords as collections of notes, and need to know what notes you are playing, and in what key, then it is much more difficult.

I'm a shapes man, myself.

John Colter

I don't think it's a notes vs shape/pattern thing for guitarists. Most of us can noddle on the darn thing like crazy before the left hand cramps up. It's the tiny scale and fingerboard of the 'ukulele that befuddles most guitarists. Took me a couple months to get used to the 20" baritone scale so I didn't cramp or have to look at my hand. A few more months for the 17" tenor scale, albeit that was an easier transition than 25.5" to 20". Now I can freely jump from any size from tenor ukulele to bass guitar without missing a lick.
 
They're not wrong. That is, in essence, what it is - a little guitar, and cute.

John Colter

That‘s how most people see it today, for sure. And that‘s also how I would explain a ukulele to someone who doesn‘t know anything about ukuleles.
However,, historically, it‘s not correct. As the modern acoustic or Spanish guitar we know today was invented in early 19th century. That was also because the technology to produce wound gut-strings - necessary for the deeper strings of a Spanish guitar - wasn’t invented earlier.
But smaller, four- or five-stringed instruments, even with reentrant tunings, were around long before that. Of course, they weren’t called ukuleles. There are tablatures for the so-called Renaissance guitar which can be played without any modifications on a modern ukulele. Check out wwelti‘s YouTube channel. He is one of the few persons I know who mostly play classical/Baroque and Renaissance music on a ukulele.

So from the point of view of an historian of instrument making, a guitar is indeed more like a enlarged ukulele. With too many strings, I would add personally.
 
The ukulele comes from the same family of instruments as the guitar and is little and cute. That's all I meant.

John Colter
 
If we go right back to the beginning, we can claim the bow, as in bow and arrow, as the common ancestor of all stringed instruments.

This is a fun topic to discuss.

Unless you really do get upset by the "little guitar" thing.

If it does really upset you, the best way to beat it is to be realistic about the instrument you own and your musical knowledge of the instrument and how well you play it. You can sound great in your lounge room with the TV on. But it could be a big mistake whipping out your uke at a general music event if you can't even work out where the C note is on your fretboard, and if you have an $80 special off Amazon that has never been set-up well. You are not going to do yourself justice. You are going to be patronised by nice people and ridiculed by nasty people.

Believe it or not, even though your $80 unset-up amazon uke has an amazing sound for the money, it does not compete well with the $600 student guitars and the $5k professional guitars and the guitar players with at least 10 years of learning. It is going to look and sound like a toy. Some of the ruder people will say its not even good enough to be called a little toy guitar.

Like many things in the arts, we all have student days. And student work. Unless you are amazing, you are a ukulele student for the first 18(?) months of playing and you need to realise that and act like a student if you want to get some credibility.

Of course if you are like me, and just play for recreation, you will never get out of the student days and you will not bother taking a uke to some events and if you do, you will compensate for poor skills and knowledge by being one of the people who have the most fun at the event.

I've seen lots of guitar players who, without the vocal accompaniment, would suck. Any instrument can lead to being patronized or ridiculed. As for "cute little guitar" comments - people tend to like guitars, so no insult there. Nothing wrong with being called cute either.
 
If we go right back to the beginning, we can claim the bow, as in bow and arrow, as the common ancestor of all stringed instruments.

I recall a workshop at the 1964 Mariposa Folk Festival in Maple Leaf Stadium. At that workshop a young Buffy St. Marie demonstrated a mouth bow that had been made for her by Patrick Sky. She talked about it being the original stringed instrument. Here's a photo that I took at that workshop.

buffy64.jpg
 
Nothing negative about the "little guitar" comments. People love the ukulele even if they don't know its proper name.

The guitar seems to be most people's point of reference so I just go with the flow
 
Gochugogi, Does your 7 string have an added bass string like George Van Eps', or an added treble string like Lenny Breau's?
I'll guess it's not an added octave G string like Spider John Koerner's.
 
At any airport: That’s neat you brought your violin. Me: Yeah, thanks!
Knitting on the bus: My grandma used to crochet, too. Me: Oh great! It's fun.
When my granddaughter said my gray Hyundai Elantra is the same as my sister's gray Audi Q7: Yup, identical!
 
Actually its part of the lute family...
 
How far back do you want to go? What preceded the lute?

John Colter
 
Actually its part of the lute family...

It all depends, as usual, on the definitions you have for your categorizations. We all have such definitions, but in most cases we use them unconsciously.

Anyway, ethnomusicologists have developed a system of instrument classification based on the physical principal used to produce a sound, i.a. does a string vibrate, some air inside the instrument or a skin, or even the whole instrument?
To sound more scientific, they use the Greek words, such as chordophone (for stringed instruments), aerophone (for wind instruments), membranophone (for instruments with skin or membrane) or idiophone („self-sounding devices“ such as rattles or shakers or scratched things like a güiro, or xylophones).

Of course, you can create percussion effects on a uke, especially on a amplified one, but I think, we all can agree on the fact, that the typical way to make a sound with a uke is by plucking the string, so it‘s a chordophone.

After that, traits of the construction are used to diferentiate, like what does the body look like, or is there one at all, in the first place? East-Asian string instruments are built with a simple, but curved board, without any proper body and neck. Harps are shaped more frame-like, also without a neck.

Of course, many instruments developed during the 20th century somehow defy theses categories, like the electric guitar or the synthesizer. They are often put into the „catch-all the things we cannot properly categorize“-category of electrophone.

As far a I know (but I did my MA in ethnomusicology some 15, 16 years ago, so I might not be up-to-date here...), the most commonly used classifications in museums and instrument collections was developed by German early ethnomusicologists Curt Sachs and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel. Both them did the bulk of their scientific work pre-WWII and both fled from the Nazis to the USA in the 1930s. Of course, there are other systems of classifying musical instruments, but this one was one of the first trying to be scientific:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_instrument_classification


According to Hornbostel and Sachs, stringed instruments with a body (made of wood or a gourd or any other object) and an attached neck is called a „lute“. THus, I would sum up this whole discussion: John Colter is right, LarryS, too, and so is myself, a little bit: the uke and the guitar do indeed belong to the same family/category of instruments. You may call it anyway you like, this category, but often it helps to use well-established and/or widespread categories, if you want to make sure the people you are talking or writing to get your point.

So, have fun, y‘all, with plucking your little guitars/lutes/ukes/chordophones/tiny stringed instruments!


EDIT: Out of curiosity (sometimes, I just can‘t help it...), I checked again on this site:

http://https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornbostel–Sachs

According to Hornbostel and Sachs, the guitar, as well as the uke (but also the violin, for example), the category for our beloved plucked little string instrument is „necked box lute“. Of course, it has a number, scientific classifications have to have numbers, in order to look really scientific. The number of the uke is 321.322. I have no idea, how this might help, though...
 
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