I was reading through the forum earlier, and noticed a few threads that seemed to have gone a bit... gnarly.
I registered on here a few weeks ago, after lurking for a couple of months while I learnt on my first ukulele, a Mahalo that cost me less than £30.
One of the things I liked - and I've been on quite a few forums of various types - was how people with 5-grand ukes would give advice to newbies and their 25 buck ukes... how luthiers with decades experience would give advice (for free!) to people with no experience who wanted to make their 25 buck uke sound a little better... how players with decades experience would advise those who don't even know what a chord is... how those who had tried (nearly) all the strings and (nearly) all the different scales and (nearly) all the main brands would help those with limited experiences and budgets navigate forward.
But that also those with cheaper ukes can advise 'upwards' freely and openly, with no snobbishness - or reverse snobbishness - from anyone. But also that, whatever ukes anyone had, making music on them took priority, and would always be the aim of any discussion - to help everyone make the music they want sound like how they want.
All this can be quite rare, most forums I've been on have little tolerance for people below a certain level ("green newbies with cheap junk"), or above a certain level ("cash-flashing show-offs with all the gear and no idea")...
You buy the best equipment you can comfortably afford for any venture, anything less is a waste, anything more is just setting yourself up for a fall. I've just bought a tenor off a fellow member, and it is at the absolute outer limit of my budget. It won't make me a better player, but it will produce more consistent results. As I get better, I may find its consistency is now lower than mine, so I will need one one with greater consistency, and so on.
But I'd like to think that when I'm stuck I would be able to turn here for advice, whether that be for chord patterns, string choices, wood differences, song suggestions, where to play at what time, or just plain old moral support... and that whether I've got a £50 uke or a £5,000 one, all would chip in regardless of what they have and play...
Please let's keep this forum the unique place it is... apologies if this post seems unnecessary or hoaky, it was just random thoughts while I was cooking the kid's dinners...
I registered on here a few weeks ago, after lurking for a couple of months while I learnt on my first ukulele, a Mahalo that cost me less than £30.
One of the things I liked - and I've been on quite a few forums of various types - was how people with 5-grand ukes would give advice to newbies and their 25 buck ukes... how luthiers with decades experience would give advice (for free!) to people with no experience who wanted to make their 25 buck uke sound a little better... how players with decades experience would advise those who don't even know what a chord is... how those who had tried (nearly) all the strings and (nearly) all the different scales and (nearly) all the main brands would help those with limited experiences and budgets navigate forward.
But that also those with cheaper ukes can advise 'upwards' freely and openly, with no snobbishness - or reverse snobbishness - from anyone. But also that, whatever ukes anyone had, making music on them took priority, and would always be the aim of any discussion - to help everyone make the music they want sound like how they want.
All this can be quite rare, most forums I've been on have little tolerance for people below a certain level ("green newbies with cheap junk"), or above a certain level ("cash-flashing show-offs with all the gear and no idea")...
You buy the best equipment you can comfortably afford for any venture, anything less is a waste, anything more is just setting yourself up for a fall. I've just bought a tenor off a fellow member, and it is at the absolute outer limit of my budget. It won't make me a better player, but it will produce more consistent results. As I get better, I may find its consistency is now lower than mine, so I will need one one with greater consistency, and so on.
But I'd like to think that when I'm stuck I would be able to turn here for advice, whether that be for chord patterns, string choices, wood differences, song suggestions, where to play at what time, or just plain old moral support... and that whether I've got a £50 uke or a £5,000 one, all would chip in regardless of what they have and play...
Please let's keep this forum the unique place it is... apologies if this post seems unnecessary or hoaky, it was just random thoughts while I was cooking the kid's dinners...
