Fixing the intonation on a new Reno.

Hi, I've just bought my first soprano ukulele by Reno and noticed the intonation on the E and C strings are off. The first thing I thought of was to cut and join two compensated guitar saddles so that the E and C strings had the compensated parts, and the A and G strings kept their regular position.

Here is an image of a compensated guitar saddle to show you what I mean:



Do you think this would help, or can someone give better advice?

It's worth a try. Here's how I fixed (well, improved) the intonation on my KoAloha longneck soprano:

It's a little rough in this picture but it works decently. What I did was cut a bone guitar saddle blank down to fit the uke and then used a little piece of what was left over to glue up a "bump" that I could carve a ramp into.

This improved the relative intonation across the strings a great deal but the absolute intonation is still a fair bit sharp by the 12th fret. I suspect maybe the bridge got mounted about 1mm too close to the sound hole on this particular uke.

John

My inexpensive Lanikai did some similar things. But after many hours of playing, it turned out to be just the strings needing to be stretched out. How many hours do you have on the new unit?

Thanks for the suggestion, OldePhart. That's a nice hack.

kamaoleBrian said:

My inexpensive Lanikai did some similar things. But after many hours of playing, it turned out to be just the strings needing to be stretched out. How many hours do you have on the new unit?

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About 6 hours I guess. Do you think I should also try with some good strings on it before I try and set it?

UkkoLeke said:

Thanks for the suggestion, OldePhart. That's a nice hack.


About 6 hours I guess. Do you think I should also try with some good strings on it before I try and set it?

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Definitely give it a chance to settle in, how bad is the intonation ?
Strings can be a factor, also the action. High action will sometimes cause a string to stretch when fretted causing it to be sharp.

UkkoLeke said:

About 6 hours I guess. Do you think I should also try with some good strings on it before I try and set it?

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Depending on how much you actually play, it may take a couple of weeks to get strings stretched properly. If the strings are bad, then that could be a factor too. Do you know what brand came on the ukulele? Some companies actually put on decent strings, so that may not even be a factor.

Even so... it's going to cost you less than $10 to replace the strings. If you go screwing around with the saddle and mess your uke up it will probably cost more than $10 to fix.