My ukulele family

Good evening splodgies! This is a well planned, but potentially poorly executed blogpost. 

So many of you will know that I AM A UKULELEIST. So here are all my ukuleles and accessories! 

Left to right, are my soprano, tenor and baritone ukuleles and underneath are the tuner, capo and strap for the baritone. I do have another purple soprano ukulele, but its currently on loan to my friend that I am teaching. I was lending it to my mother but she was not very good at practicing or wanting to improve. Sarah has proved a much better and enthusiastic pupil! Good on yer, Sarah!! 

This was the third ukulele I owned- I bought it during my year abroad because I couldn't take my tenor over with me because it was too big and I wanted a better quality one than the Mahalo soprano I'd taken with me in the first term. So I bought this one on Amazon because I knew that lanikai was a great brand of ukuleles and it came with good strings. It lived in the case of the purple one for a while before I got a padded grey case and then most recently I got the colourful one as seen in the picture. 

This is my lanikai tenor ukulele. It is one of my most prized posessions! It was a christmas present during my first year of univesity. It's played the same way as a soprano, but there are 17 frets rather than 12. It is the third size of ukulele. The only size I don't own (other than a U-Bass, but I don't really count that) is a concert (alto) ukulele. I'm thinking I might get an electroacoustic concert ukulele at some point. Concert ukes have 15 frets. 

This is my baritone ukulele. Another gift from my parents! They asked if I really still wanted another ukulele and then I pointed out that my dad has more guitars than I have ukuleles, and the point was discussed no further. A baritone is played differently in that it is a lot more similar to a guitar than its smaller counterparts and is strung with two wound metal strings and two nylon strings. It's tuned differently and as a result you have to learn all the chords again in a different formation. It's played as the top four strings of a guitar would normally be played. 

This tuner was another present, this time from my sister. All you gotta do is clip it to the head of your ukulele and press the on button! What's really good about it is you can tune up in the dark in a noisy place so even if you can't even hear your own ukulele with lots of other people tuning up around you, you know that you're getting pinpoint accuracy. The dial is kind of like a speedometer with the ideal pitch being displayed in the very middle and then the colour bending to the left or right depending on whether its sharp or flat. The capo I only really use for the baritone and the strap is for playing whilst standing up- it doens't actually attatch to the ukulele, but has a little hook that goes into the bottom of the sound hole so that most of the weight is taken off the arms. This makes for less tension whilst playing and generally makes things more comfortable 

 The great thing about ukuleles is that they are easy enough to teach yourself in the beginnings, and if you get really good you can look quite impressive. This one time I absolutely upstaged a man in a music shop by wiping the floor with his rendition of Guns n' Roses' "Sweet Child of Mine" compared to my utterly flawless plucking. 

Hopefully Sarah and I will get to record some songs together at sometime or something... What do you think? Let me know in the comments!! 

Today, this is me- very pleased with my ukulele collection:

See you tomorrow splodekins!

-Rosa

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