When Did The Small G (gCEA) Begin?

TLDR; Does anyone have a reference to the earliest time a lower-case g (gCEA) was used for naming a ukulele tuning?

My poor attempt at humor writing in another thread that the lower-case g isn't as "high" as the upper-case G and therefore stands for an octave lower g only confused the issue. So to make up for it, I thought I'd try to find how gCEA came into existence.

Going to my favorite reference (Tranquada and King) I learned that the earliest references to any tunings were in instruction books written in 1894, 1906, 1907, and 1909. They all used the re-entrant GCEA tuning. By 1909 there was also one book using re-entrant ADF#B.

It was in the second decade of the 1900s that instruction books were printed with the above tunings (also DGBD) with either high or low 4th strings. No mention was made of a shorthand approach to the string naming for a low g, but rather the musical notation showed the 4th string as being an octave lower. (There was also some form of tablature starting by 1906.)

So after all this, and a little interwebs browsing, I've learned a few things:

• I'm no closer to knowing when the first use of "gCEA" began
• A few web sites and intro books want to call gCEA the re-entrant tuning and GCEA the linear one.
• Most smart people pay no attention to the big or little g and always write "re-entrant (or High) GCEA" or "linear (or low) GCEA" before discussing one or the other.
• In the future, I will try to be like smart people

If you have any information on how the lower case g started, let us know.

ubulele said:

The genesis was explained in the previous thread: lowercase g for re-entrant tuning was a borrowing from the convention of labeling the "re-entrant" drone string on banjo. The banjo convention may have arisen during the 1940s, when Earl Scruggs helped to make the 5-stringer hugely popular. Without checking, I know it was a near-universal convention by the 1970s, because all of my old banjo books used it.

Yeah, best just to say "re-entrant" and "linear", because the shorthand is used not just inconsistently but in exactly opposite ways. Why should a reader have to infer what each poster, following his own pet convention, means?

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Thanks for mentioning the Banjo. Perhaps it was borrowed from a banjo convention; that seems to be a pretty good guess. There's a reference from the 1890s of the uke being like a small banjo, probably thinking 4-string banjo. Looking at some sheet music from the 20s and 30s, many times the top of the page will read "Uke / Banjulele" or something similar. In the sheet music I saw, all the melodies could be played with a high g, so no need to distinguish high or low.

Perhaps when the short 5th banjo string became popular, it made sense to use a "short G (g)" for that re-entrant string.

I had always assumed that the gCGBD notation for banjo tuning originated with Pete Seeger's 1948 book How To Play The 5 String Banjo which is still in print.
Scruggs joined the Bluegrass Boys in 1945, but I'm not sure he had anything to do with the small g notation. His banjo book was released in 1968, 20 years after Pete's.

Jim Yates said:

I had always assumed that the gCGBD notation for banjo tuning originated with Pete Seeger's 1948 book How To Play The 5 String Banjo which is still in print.
Scruggs joined the Bluegrass Boys in 1945, but I'm not sure he had anything to do with the small g notation. His banjo book was released in 1968, 20 years after Pete's.

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I checked the "Looked Inside" for the book on Amazon and in one of the appendices, there it was. The curious thing was that he didn't use a lower case g, but rather an upper case G, but it was placed about halfway lower on the line than the rest of the upper case letters. So, thanks Jim and I'll use this as the starting point for the low g unless someone comes up with earlier info.

The 1st string is A, the 2nd, E, 3rd, C, 4th string is G. So, why isn't the tuning called AECG?

UkerDanno said:

The 1st string is A, the 2nd, E, 3rd, C, 4th string is G. So, why isn't the tuning called AECG?

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There's a thread for that: https://forum.ukuleleunderground.co...-convention-tuning-sequence-vs-string-numbers

tl;dr version:

UkerDanno said:

The 1st string is A, the 2nd, E, 3rd, C, 4th string is G. So, why isn't the tuning called AECG?

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I've seen it written that way round on early music sites when referring to the tuning of the renaissance guitar which was tuned the same as the ukelele - and to the tuning of string instruments generally, they seem to list the pitches starting from the first string.

Whenever you start something, you start at the bottom/beginning, & work your way up, so why not start with the top down, just to be different & stand out. :smileybounce:

More likely it is because someone was asked what the strings were, & they looked down, so started from the nearest to them, the uppermost string....... :nana:


Conventions just happen when enough people repeat them.

I always assumed that the tuning was identified as “GCEA” because that’s how the notes sound when singing “My Dog Has Fleas.” It wouldn’t make sense any other way, “Dog My Fleas Has,” Fleas Dog Has My,” etc.

What annoys me is printed ukulele music that does not specify which tuning is to be used. I’m okay with the default being high G, but when it is for low G that fact really needs to be prominently declared.