Buying Strategy

peterbright

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When I first thought about expanding into ukuleles from acoustic guitars, electric guitars and basses, I bought an inexpensive tenor and I was underwhelmed. Then I followed my own experience with other instruments...did some research and jumped into the 4 K's and was amazed at the ease of playability, sound and quality of construction. After buying and playing all four of the K's I settled on my favorite...a Ko'Aloha, It wasn't the best in every category, but overall it met my needs (after experimenting with strings etc.).

I am in the process of buying a Kamaka White Label Baritone off the forum and will probably add other K's along the way. Although all the K's are more than fancy enough for me, any suggestions on the next one I should buy? What I hope to find is the most "ukee" sounding compared to the most "small guitaree sounding". Most of the sound samples I have found on line make the Baritone Uke sound more like a small guitar.

Any suggestions including tuning, strings, wood or brand would be appreciated.
 
The only way that I can imagine to get a baritone sounding like a normal uke, is to have it in re entrant tuning, & maybe in gCEA, but it will still have a much rounder & fuller sound, because of its body size. :)

(Maybe try a long neck tenor instead.)
 
Yeah, oftentimes folks choose the baritone trying to get more of a guitar sound with DGBE tuning like the top 4 strings of guitar. The two wound strings setup accentuates this. If you want something less so, try it with a high d string - the Living Water set would be a good choice but there are others. I'd also steer towards more "uke like" woods like koa, acacia, mahogany, myrtle (depending on your taste) and less spruce or cedar - but that's really tricky as tone is more a factor of the builder than the wood species.
 
I also suggest using reentrant tuning, high G, which I prefer over low G. After playing guitar for almost 50 years, one of the things I like most about playing uke is high G tuning because it doesn't sound like a guitar, if I want a guitar sound, I would play the guitar, not that I find I ever will, I'm hooked on uke.

When I first started playing uke over 5 years ago, I went for tenors in the $150-$200 range, but when I bought a Kala solid cedar, acacia koa for $380 by suggestion from Mim, I got rid of all but 4 of the 16 I had. Doing a comparison to the K brands convinced me that the Kala was so close, it wasn't worth it for me to spend 3 times the price, but that's just me, I realize that taking the step up is worth it for some people.


8 tenor cutaway ukes, 5 acoustic bass ukes, 10 solid body bass ukes, 7 mini electric bass guitars

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