Review: Idyllwild Soprano Ukulele

Monoprice has been an online retailer offering a lot of quality electronics supplies (particularly cables) at affordable prices for quite a while. They have added some instruments to their collection, some that have been available for years.

I had a chance to look at a student's Idyllwild Soprano a couple of years ago, and it seemed like a good beginner ukulele, but that was without much time to really inspect the ukulele.

Monoprice occasionally carries these as "Open Box" models, and I couldn't help myself to buy one for about $25, including shipping.

In short, it is very well built, and comes with a gig bag that is probably worth half of the cost of its normal price, and almost all of the cost at the $25 open box price. New models come with a complete kit and a slightly different bag.

Negatives include a lack of side position markers, sharp fret ends, and a very middle-of-the-road sound.

The action was great on this one, and the playing experience is the same as any of the many ukuleles with a 35mm neck and a C shaped neck.

Is it going to appeal to the masses of UU? Nope. Does it make a decent solution for a new ukulele for a beginner or a student who doesn't have a lot of money? Yep. Is it horrible? Nope.

I'd still recommend the Aiersi Pineapple over this model, for sound and features, even though that is no longer the bargain it once was (Aiersi charges $15 shipping through AliExpress these days, making it a $42 ukulele).

Full UkeGuide review below, followed by the One Minute Review. You can see the PDF summary at ukeguide.info (which is a shortcut to the UkeGuide page on my normal ukestuff.info website).

The full review is long, but is intended to be; you can use the chapter feature to skip to elements of the review that you would like to see.

This is my favorite beginner's uke, though I don't have quite the experience with these types of ukes that you do. I haven't tried a lot of online import ukes. I have tried Enya and Caramel, and think they're great for what they cost. In my experience, some of the bigger names like Cordoba and Kala/Makala were disappointing (especially given the price hike). But the Monoprice Idyllwild I got seemed just as good or better than some of those, and at half the price or less.

I didn't have the sharp fret issue. And while the tone on mine isn't a match for any of my solid wood ukes, I'd say it equals or approaches many of the laminates I've owned or played. To be fair, I have a harder time distinguishing quality of tone with laminates.

Anyway, I was excited to see your review. Now I want to go try an Aiersi Pineapple for reference. The Idyllwild is probably the best uke I can think of in terms of price to quality ratio. I mean, I greatly prefer my Kamaka or Rebel, but while they're amazing, I'd hesitate to say each dollar spent there bought as much quality as it did with the Idyllwild. Diminishing returns and all that.

Thanks for doing these. I'm not a teacher myself, but I know a few, and although now's a weird time for music instruction, it's nice to have a resource to point them to if they need to get classroom instruments.

Thanks for your thoughts. I keep waiting for Aiersi pineapples to appear in the Amazon store, and at the moment, there are no Aiersi available through Amazon. I played the solid top concert that I reviewed earlier this year (it has different strings now) as I have to go through and check humidifiers every two weeks at this point (humidifiers in the sound hole were dry, the secondary "external" humidifiers I put in the cases and bags were all still okay). I shook my head in disbelief playing it again, and that's a $35 ukulele (they were even lower than that for a while).

I'm working on buying a few of the Aiersi pineapples, but shipping is not my friend right now. And there are now two models out there...one has 15 frets (like mine) and the other has 12 frets. Both are getting good reviews from people that play them. A string swap is a necessity with any Aiersi.

As for the Idyllwild...it's a decent instrument, and I would be okay with anyone that brought one to my classes as an instrument. And I'll probably give into the temptation and swap out the strings to see what happens (I ran out of M600 strings, so I placed an order yesterday for four more sets).