Ukulelenboard

There are so many very wonderfull made ukuleles with very exotic woods and I think that they are sounding wonderfull but is it still a ukulele ?


[size=18]There are so many ukuleles today who look and feel

more like a guitar with 4 four strings than a ukulele.[/size]

The more I see them, the more I want a simple no nonsense sopraan ukulele !

What is your opinion ?

It is! Everyone can get whatever he/she likes. My choice is also the old style.

Of course everyone should do what he likes to do and the question, how to define \"ukulele\" or \"not ukulele\" has been asked often before.
I am not a ukulele-taliban - well, at least not a complete, but I got my own opinion about this.
I think since the age of englightenment it is common sense, that a thing is defined by its purpose. Everything you can use as a table, is a table while you use it for this purpose.
So what is the purpose of a ukulele? Of course play music - and to be precise - play music that sounds like music played with a ukulele. So there has to be a special charakter of the ukulele and its tone which differs from other instruments. What could this character be?  I think the special character of the ukulele depends on  something like a principle of reduction. I guess it´s pretty common that the ukulele is a small instrument (and of course a plucking instrument - I hope we don´t have to discuss about that) - I would go so far to say that this is the most important point. The next might be the number of strings - I would say that it is OK to put more than four strings on a uke, but not less than four and according to the principle of reduction I think four strings are perfect.
I could go further and think about the style of the body, the wood and so on - but I think that it is not necessary, that are minor points.
As a result of this, the ukulele has a reduced spectrum of tone - often described as the \"plonk\"-sound. If you are not satisfied by the sound of a ukulele and try to change it by choosing a bigger instrument there may come the point, when you find yourself buying a guitar.
To me, the the soprano ukulele represents the essential idea of ukulele also because I think it is the smallest size to be played properly all and every day. Every bigger size is a bit farer away from the idea of ukulele.
There are several very beautiful (soprano and perhaps even concert - made of koa, mahogany, spruce,... - pineapple, martin-k-style... ) ukuleles which are perfect ukuleles.
(If you like, you can pay someone, to work half a year to craft the perfect top for you koa-ukulele, that´s fine.)
But when it comes to the point, a simple, mahogany soprano ukulele is what a ukulele is about.

I agree, but I have to confess that I also love other sized ukuleles. But when I should go to an uninhabited island and could only take one ukulele with me...............................well then I took without a doubt a soprano. Oke it will be my Brueko gabun.

Probably you will think so when you see my Glyph.

But then:
It\'s not a tenor, but a soprano.
It does NOT have a slotted headstock
It\'s tuned high g, not low g.
It got pegheads. I admit they are geared 1:4, but they don\'t look like it (unless you know).
OK, it got a pickup, but the pickup is rather well hidden, and the end pin (with the output) is quite smaller as usual.
It got \"only\" 15 frets, not 17 or more, and the fretboard ends well before the sound hole.

Sure, it\'s much fancier as a humble schaepe, but it also plays and sounds really nice (which was the most important thing for me). BTW, some really old Ukes don\'t look so much different from it, with spruce top and all.

So is it now an ukulele, or isn\'t it? Please tell me, Doctor


Btw, I still play my most humble schaepe ukulele a lot.

Regards
  Wilfried

Oh no It is not to me to say what is a real ukulele, It\'s my job only to drop the question !

I understand you are only looking for opinions.  So in my opinion it depends what kind of music you wanna play or what kind of sound you like. If you like to adapt guitar pieces or if you want to play some jazz you might prefer a low-G stringed tenor uke, although jazz can also be fine with standard soprano. If you like to play classical tunes you may have any choice of uke. For pure accompaniment any uke will do. For nonsense music a plastic soprano is most likely the right choice. So it\'s up to your preferences. In any case, a low-G tenor for e.g., or even a bariton uke, never, never reaches the capabilities of a guitar, thus they will ever be different!

Edit: a 4-stringed guitar (?) is either a bass or a ukulele!  

Zitat von: CarusoI am not a ukulele-taliban...

:mrgreen:  :mrgreen:  :mrgreen:

But I am.
Caruso wrote about the \"idea of a ukulele\". Very important in my mind! A ukulele should have four strings (or more tuned unison) and above all: it should sound like a ukulele.
Some tenors already don\'t have the sound I relate the term \"ukulele\" with and certainly no baritones - to me thats guitars for people who have no ability to handle a proper guitar, that\'s why they have four strings only.

Some ukes are very fancy with expensive woods and shiny bindings and rosettes and stuff but still those are ukuleles if the sound is right. Like a Rolls Royce, it is still a car - the only difference to ordinary cars is that it shows the world how wealthy the owner is.

My first \"right\" uke was an Ohana. I liked the fancy looks - but in the meantime I prefer it very simple, like Ken Timms\' Ukes, no purflings or other things, just plain wood - gorgeous! But that\'s only me...

If all things are fixed strictly,  there is very few chance for development or new things to come up.  I feel there is not even a need to seperate between Guitar or Ukulele. Would not mind to have a contrabass with soprano strings or a Guitar with 3 strings or a Ukulele with one string only. Let it be. It does not do any harm, but may be something nice and interesting is coming out of it. I like a Uke made of a shoebox. And if somebody exactly knows what´s right and what´s wrong I only want to shit on it.

This may get a bit overdone - but anyway!

Zitat von: jazzjaponiqueI feel there is not even a need to seperate between Guitar or Ukulele.

Well, when you feel no need to, why not just call them \"musical instrument\"? When you give a name to something, you draw a distinction between it and anything else. When you call one instrument ukulele and the other guitar - then there is be a difference between them. This has nothing to do with right oder wrong - which are normative attributions - I would call it the recronstruction of cognition.
So, if we want it or not, there is a difference between guitar and ukulele - or in other terms, the are separated - by different definitions. (I talked some blablabla about this above.)
I don´t want to talk about right or wrong, but I know that I like the sound of the ukulele (I like the sound of guitars too, of course) and I start to think about, what a ukulele sounds like. And then I think, that ukuleles and guitars have some things in common and perhaps it is possible, to think of a scale on which one end the instrument is a ukulele and on the other it is a guitar (I know, this is a bit simple), now, where is the point, where an instrument is no longer a ukulele but a guitar or reverse. And it may come to the point, where you find out, that on the one hand you know that there must be an difference, but on the other hand - the longer you look at the differences, the less you find true differences by itself. You could call this a problem of dialectic or of constructivism - or anything else - if you like. It may seem to be a silly idea but I find it interesting to think about, because it tells me something about myself. And this is the point, where it really starts to get exciting because this leads to the idea, that the way we look at the world and give names to the things (you could even say \"judge\" ) tells much more - perhaps simply - about ourselves than about the things we look at.
So what we are doing here, is talking about ourselves and telling each other what we think the world is about.
And leaving this weird ukulele-philosophy, I start to think about if I can find the beauty of ukulele by just playing and listening to it. That´s a more spiritual way to handle whith the problem - perhaps quite Buddhistic. (Why not write a Haiku about it? (I hope this is not assuming.))

Tiny Ukulele
no difference between
you and me.

Great!

For me (and probably me alone) a ukulele is defined by the tuning.

Re-entrant, that is the key word.

I absolutely do not care for the wood, the size, the tuners (we are talking about the definition, else of course I care, and not in a way most people do, a uke needs ears!), the shape, the piezo and so on...

But non-re-entrant... Well, that is a castrated (maybe mini-)guitar. Which is not a bad thing at all, but it is not very uke-ish.

Zitat von: WS64...a uke needs ears!...

No.

I thought about the argument concerning the re-entrant tuning and I agree, that the tuning is really important for the typical sound of a ukulele but I don´t think that a ukulele can be defined only by this.
The tuning is a typical quality of the ukulele and very chararistic, but I think that the re-entrant tuning produces its distinctivness when you strum and it´s less important when your plucking a melody - but a ukulele still sounds like a ukulele when it´s plucked. I think that many people expect a ukulele to sound in a way which is produced by the small body of this instrument, the *plonk*-sound. There are some fine, crafted ukuleles which sound very brilliant and bright and (perhaps) no one would say that e.g. a glyph is no ukulele because it sounds too bright.
But - looking at the question of Dr Dick - this thread deals with something I would call the purity of ukulele (yes, this is a bit weird, but I like it.) The problem (in the meaning of a dynamic) which is related to the question is, that people playing the uke sometimes are at odds about the limited range of the sound of their ukulele or find it hard to play on the small sizes and try to enhance the qualities by picking larger instruments, amplifiing it, apply ears and so on. And some people think that it may come to the point, where the instrument does not sound (or look) any longer like a ukulele and perhaps is no real ukulele any more. A silly idea, but worth thinking about.
Another argument, I was thinking about is that I think there are instruments which sound more like a ukulele and some which sound less like a ukulele. I would say a banjo sounds more like a ukulele than a guitar, not because of the tuning, but because of the sharp, percussive sound. And according to this, an amplified ukulele often sounds less like a ukulele than an acoustic.
Talking about theses aspects, the ice is getting thinner because it deals with what people think about what a ukuele should sound like and what not and this makes it hard to argue with it.

@ Jan: Sorry, I have to be honest - I´m a ukulele-taliban, too!  :oops: