Charles Guy
Well-known member
About a month ago I was looking at some spare ukulele parts laying about and decided to put them on a toy soprano sitting here on a shelf in the home office. It's a First Act soprano that one of the grandkids bought when Toys R Us was going out of business for 75% off so we paid less than $10 USD for it back in 2018. Now it has bone nut & saddle, Grover tuners, Fremont hard black fluros plus Rosette diamond string ties. Was surprised that it really does sound a tiny (tinny) bit better and enjoyed plunking along on it between emails, calls, and reading UU Forums when I did not want to pick up one of the baritones and practice.
This encouraged me to start looking at retuning the KA-B to GCEA and after reading what I could find and listening to lots of clips decided on Low G and ordered a set of PhD strings online. They arrived in record time (3 days) and I installed them after a good cleaning and inspection of the Kala. Slowly brought them up close to tune on the first day then started on day two to get them to correct frequencies. The 1st (A) string snapped at 410 Hz in the string tie and I put the extra string on and very carefully worked for two days bringing it up to 440 Hz. Worked well until day three and seemed settled nicely with a good sound. Then I came back from lunch that afternoon and found the A string had snapped between the bridge and neck over the sound hole. Looking close it had frayed apart like line on a ship when you put to much strain on it.
My question is did I do something wrong string frequency wise or is breaking strings a common issue for baritones when you use GCEA string sets to change the tuning? I swapped the other three out and now have a spare set of DGBE strings on until and if I try again based on any recommendations from this post. Otherwise I believe that I will purchase a nice all wood tenor instead of a different baritone come the end of the year after I have saved up enough. Maybe that is the best option?
As info I was tuning based on this;
4th string - 196 Hz 3rd string - 262 Hz 2nd string - 330 Hz 1st string 440 Hz
This encouraged me to start looking at retuning the KA-B to GCEA and after reading what I could find and listening to lots of clips decided on Low G and ordered a set of PhD strings online. They arrived in record time (3 days) and I installed them after a good cleaning and inspection of the Kala. Slowly brought them up close to tune on the first day then started on day two to get them to correct frequencies. The 1st (A) string snapped at 410 Hz in the string tie and I put the extra string on and very carefully worked for two days bringing it up to 440 Hz. Worked well until day three and seemed settled nicely with a good sound. Then I came back from lunch that afternoon and found the A string had snapped between the bridge and neck over the sound hole. Looking close it had frayed apart like line on a ship when you put to much strain on it.
My question is did I do something wrong string frequency wise or is breaking strings a common issue for baritones when you use GCEA string sets to change the tuning? I swapped the other three out and now have a spare set of DGBE strings on until and if I try again based on any recommendations from this post. Otherwise I believe that I will purchase a nice all wood tenor instead of a different baritone come the end of the year after I have saved up enough. Maybe that is the best option?
As info I was tuning based on this;
4th string - 196 Hz 3rd string - 262 Hz 2nd string - 330 Hz 1st string 440 Hz
