bennyhana22
Well-known member
As long as ukes have been ukes, there have been linear ukes, so the "is it a uke?" question is not subjective, it's just silly and aggravating.
The second question is also silly: a linear uke is "just trying to be" a linear uke, nothing more nor less. Why does it have to "try to be" anything but what it is? If people want to play small guitars, there are guitarleles. I play ukes in linear tunings because of their many advantages, both with respect to guitars and with respect to re-entrant fleas ukes (and ukes in other tunings, like fifths).
Should you push forward with low G? Given your apparent mindset, I'd say "not at present." You're not approaching it with an open mind, but rather with re-entrant tuning blinders and too strong a bias for the re-entrant sound. Maybe, after seeing what others do with linear tunings, the light may dawn, you'll have a more focused motivation, and you'll revise your opinion; you'll be more inclined to appreciate linear tuning's strengths instead of focusing on its seeming weaknesses and unfamiliarity to your ear and hands—just as you did with re-entrant tuning.
Although you can find lots of arrangements for linear tunings, you'll find blessed little that really explains how best to exploit these tunings. In large part that's because, in the uke world generally, linear tuning is treated as just some variant of re-entrant tuning—same chord shapes, after all, so how different could it be? As you can see from responses above, even some linear players haven't really wrapped their heads around all the differences yet. So my advice is: don't wait to be told and guided, pay closer attention to what people are doing with linear tunings, even work out your own arrangements. Then maybe you'll see that the same picking patterns don't produce the same effects (and don't need to be changed as often, to dance around pesky unisons between strings), or how you can get more voice line separation, or how you have a wider pitch range available in every neck position, or how the chords sound more spacious and full, how the voicings sound more distinctive, how the lower string pitches convey more gravitas, etc. There are downsides, too, but every tuning is a compromise, and that's why I like having a choice between linear and re-entrant tunings (and also between higher and lower tunings).
Holy Cow do some of you guys take things too seriously and/or literally!
Notwithstanding the difficulty in interpreting nuance in a brief piece of text, especially if you don't know the writer, a few of the responses to my light-hearted OP have been pretty snarky!
I've re-read my OP a few times and, although obviously I cannot be fully consciously objective as they're my words, I fail to see why some of you have responded rather negatively!
Lighten up, dudes!
All I was saying is, I'm historically only familiar with re entrant, I've got a lovely new tenor, I strung it low G as I wanted to see what it is like, I'm finding it all a bit weird, I love to pick four string arpeggiated patterns and am finding that sonically strange with the lowest string being on the fourth rather than the third string. So, fool that I am, I thought I'd hit up the cognoscenti on UU for their thoughts and guidance! What an idiot I was, eh?!
Anyway, many thanks once again to those courteous enough not to feel they needed to be somewhat judgmental towards what I naively thought was a nice request for advice and guidance.
Feel free to close the thread, Mods.
Ben