
Originally Posted by
southcoastukes
This, I guess, is more or less what I was getting to. Standard, or Helmholz notation is supposedly "standard". Yet not only have I never seen it used in an ukulele method book (the Handbook is mainly a comprehesive chord book), I don't think I've ever seen anyone use it on this forum. I got to wondering if something else had come into common use, as it seems most ukulele players use a language I have to struggle to understand.
You see things like cGDA, or dGBE and so on. In context, you can sorta, kinda figure out what is meant, but if you're not going to use standard notation, for me it gets really complicated and cloudy in a hurry. Is the first string supposed to be at a lower pitch than the 4th?
The original Machete tuning for an ukulele was an open G tuning: d" g' b' d". Pull up that first string and you're back in a normal Ukulele reentrant tuning: d" g' b' e", one that many ukulele players are familiar with from the Baritone Ukulele. Of course there, it's an octave lower: d' g b e' or d g b e'.
If you know standard notation, you know the first tunings were an octave above the second two, and of the last two, the first was reentrant and the second was linear. It seems a lot easier to write tunings like this, but "standard" notation seems like another language here. Puzzling, since I don't see anything complicated about writing in "the standard".
A common language is the essential tool in any society. This "language" is out there for the "Ukulele Tribe" to adopt. If we could speak to each other more clearly, it would be to the advantage of all of us.
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