Hi! I'm looking around for a (relativley cheap, around $200 is prefered but it can be higher!) electric ukulele that I will be able to plug into an amp and use distortion pedals! I was looking at some acoustic-electrics but my dad said they wouldn't work due to the lack of pickups. Is he correct? Does anyone have any reccomendations?
Apparently your father is unaware of piezo pickups, both under-saddle, and surface-transducer types, which are the de facto standard, and sole option for both acoustic/electric ukulele, guitar violin and many other instruments that are primarily acoustic.
Any instrument you see listed as "acoustic-electric" is going to have some form of piezo pickup in it, and the mid-to-high end instruments might also have a tiny internal micriphone.
If you were looking at, or your father was thinking in terms of steel string electric or acoustic guitar with magnetic pickups and using that perspective for ukulele, there are only a few brands that have them factory made, and most others are custom made and serious $$$$.
You would do well, to do some research on this.
Some folks believe that because the ukulele has nylon-type strings that this is not optimal to use with a distortion pedal. Remember these are just opinions of other people. You can do anything you want.
Steel strings will have more 'bite' and longer sustain than nylon strings, this is due to physics and how the strings are made. Steel strings have like 10x the molecular weight and linear density than nearly ALL ukulele and classical guitar strings, and that allows them to have way more sustain
I use effects all the time with my nylon-strung acoustic-electric ukuleles, mostly reverb, compression, and delay. I am not a fan of using distortion any more since my music not longer follows a path that requires it.
In my own ukes, I use either the Mi-Si Acoustic Trio pickup and preamp kit, which I've installed myself on several instruments, or other pickups that I have designed and built myself from scratch.
For a pre-made piezo pickup system for ukulele, there are hundreds of options to choose from.
ACTIVE pickups, with a built-in preamp are better than passive pickups because they solve many problems, most notably IMPEDANCE MISMATCH. I have written expensively about IMPEDANCE MISMATCH her eon UU, and you can see those posts via the FAQ link in my forum signature below.
You need to know about IMPEDANCE MISMATCH if you are going to use a pickup with an acoustic instrument, otherwise, if you do not use a preamp, your pickup will sound like garbage, and in such a way that
no amount of EQ can fix.
This is an electrical problem, NOT an audio problem.