Hello from San Francisco

daviddecom

Active member
Joined
Dec 15, 2016
Messages
41
Reaction score
0
I've been playing the ukulele for about four months, after buying a cheap soprano on Amazon for my three-year-old and discovering how much fun it was to play myself.

My musical background is (classical) violin and voice. I briefly tried out the banjo five or so years ago but never got the hang of it---too much of a stretch compared to the violin and too loud to practice at night. The ukulele, though, turns out to be perfect for someone coming from the violin, and it's just as satisfying to play quietly when everyone in the house is asleep.

I've already been bitten by UAS---I quickly got another soprano for myself so my daughter and I can "play" together, and I just got a nice concert for Christmas.

Kudos on fostering such a welcoming, knowledgeable community!

David
 
Welcome from Santa Clara in the South Bay. You are in luck about your UAS because there is Aloha Warehouse on Buchanan Street which has luthiers available so you can get a proper setup done.

-- Gary
 
Welcome to UU - you mentioned having a small child and also the night practice options for ukulele. Have you ever combined the two? I found that a softly played ukulele (fingerpicking is great for this) kept my twins from keeping each other wound up and awake.

Also - you mentioned that uke is perfect coming from the violin. If you really want to get crazy with it, Aquila makes a set of strings to tune a concert uke in 5ths (CDGA - viola tuning).
 
I've thought about playing for bedtime, but, while I enjoy quiet fingerpicking, I haven't really been disciplined enough in my practice to play anything really smoothly, and knowing my daughter, she'd have plenty to say about any stops and starts. Also, since she was the first one in the house to get a ukulele, she still thinks of it as her thing to do---playing for bedtime might get her up out of bed to play, too! Once I have a few pieces under my belt, though ...

The idea of using fifths tuning on the ukulele is definitely interesting. I think I should probably get better at playing with the standard re-entrant tuning first, though, before confusing myself with more fingerings. The re-entrant tuning is actually a big part of what drew me to both the banjo and the ukulele. Now that I have a new concert uke, though, there's an extra soprano lying around, and it looks like Aquila actually has a soprano set with violin tuning, so maybe I should be putting in a stringsbymail order soon.

And I've already discovered Aloha Warehouse---that's where my Pono concert came from!

David
 
A Pono that got setup properly is a great choice! You realize if you tune your soprano that way you'll have what is called a Mandolele.

-- Gary
 
I decided to restring my Kala soprano with Aquila fifths set, which is in violin tuning, so I guess I do now have a mandolele. There are a couple of things I've already learned from this experience:

First, I started by just replacing the fourth string with the wound low G of the new set, and I discovered that linear tuning, even on a soprano, is actually quite nice. I should really focus on getting better at playing one kind of ukulele for now (i.e., concert reentrant C), but I'll definitely explore linear tuning more later.

I also found that I really like the sound of the wound bass string. The one thing I've been a little bit unhappy about with both my soprano and concert instruments is that higher frets on the C string don't really ring out (and I've tried a number of different strings). So I got the Southcoast MU-W3 set for my Pono, and it's been amazing so far!

Anyhow, after changing the rest of the strings on the soprano and realizing I can now strum Mozart and Wieniawski on the ukulele (until it gets too high), I started reading through some fiddle tunes, which is something I've never been totally comfortable with on the violin for whatever reason.

The next thing I learned is that violin first position doesn't really correspond to what I had been thinking of as first position on the ukulele. I had been thinking of the pairing of first fret-index, second fret-middle, third fret-ring, fourth fret-pinky as first position on the ukulele, but when I'm playing violin music, first position is really second fret-index, fourth fret-middle, fifth fret-ring, seventh fret-pinky. It's actually a tiny bit more of a stretch on the ukulele than on the violin, especially for the pinky (I think the scale lengths differ by half an inch or something like that, plus the arm position is obviously different), but not really a big deal. In any case, I've already used that insight to rethink fingerings for fingerstyle ukulele pieces I've been trying to learn on the concert, and it's been really helpful.

Finally, I've realized that the fiddle and plucked string idioms are somewhat different. Even the simplest fiddle tunes have lots of runs on the same string, whereas plucked string music has a lot more arpeggiation across strings---I guess for obvious reasons, although I'd never really thought about it before. My fingerpicking just isn't fast enough yet to play divisions on the same string, which haven't really come up in the ukulele music I've been trying out. Hammering on and pulling off help a little (and come pretty naturally), and I've tried to use mandolin picking technique but with my index nail, but I'm wondering whether there are other ways to execute same-string runs quickly on a ukulele.

Thanks!
David
 
Top Bottom