Loving my new uke!

KevinFL

UU VIP
UU VIP
Joined
Apr 16, 2010
Messages
1,040
Reaction score
904
Location
North FL
I picked up a Makala MK-S at my local music store on Friday and fell in love instantly. This is a lot of fun and is allowing my guitars to get a well deserved break.

The laminated agathis body is very attractive and reminiscent of mahogany. I dug into my guitar tool chest and took some 0000 steel wool to the body to take off the roughness, gently massaged it with a light coat of essential oil, lowered the nut slots a little, and she's good to go. I have some Aquila strings on the way that I'll string her up with when they get here.

This is the face of a happy new uke player...

Ukulele.jpg
 
Looks good! Makala is a great uke- can't go wrong. I've been playing mine for a year now and want to upgrade to somethin "better", but frankly... I really don't need to.

I've got a solid mahogany Kala on the way and am thinking that wasn't really necessary at this point. After adjusting tuner screws, and the other things I did, the only thing left is to shave a little off the saddle and perhaps compensate it and this uke will be enough to hold me for quite a while. The Kala is a concert though so it'll give me some variety.

I can't get over how addictive this thing is. I normally play guitar for at least 2+ hours in the evening after work, and around 5 a day on the weekend but the uke has taken over. I've memorized several chords, a couple scales, a few tunes, have some good strum patterns going, and have been working on the flamenco picking exercise from the posted video. I do a lot of Travis picking on the guitar so I like the idea of working it out on the uke too. This is good stuff! I lived in Hawaii for 4 years and never picked up the uke...always too busy with the guitar. I wish I would have had more interest in it back then.
 
The laminated agathis body is very attractive and reminiscent of mahogany. I dug into my guitar tool chest and took some 0000 steel wool to the body to take off the roughness, gently massaged it with a light coat of essential oil, lowered the nut slots a little, and she's good to go.

lol, this is just like reading a paragraph from one of those aldult novels I've... urm... heard about :p
 
lol, this is just like reading a paragraph from one of those aldult novels I've... urm... heard about :p

That was pretty funny until I rememberd him talking about filing slots in the nut....
 
I reseated and polished the frets, oiled the board, dressed and adjusted the saddle, and lowered the C nut slut just a tad more. I'm very happy with this uke. It carries well to work, follows me around the house, and is so much fun to learn on. I've got a compendium of songs I'll learn and I'm just taking it easy with a few of them at the moment. Uncle's Joe's tutelage files were very helpful as well for learning chord forms.

I'll be hitting the beach up on Thursday and the uke is coming with me. :cool:
 
Congrats Kevin. It's only the beginning......
 
I got my MK-S from MGM a little over a month ago. Since I got it the tone has gotten noticeably nicer. I love it. Now I feel bad if I don't get an hour a day playing with it.

It was so good I wanted to try a tenor. Got my KA-TEM from MGM on Monday and have been playing with that. Playing sure is addictive!
 
Top Bottom