Christmas Gifts for Ukulele Players: Stocking Fillers

A quick guide to what little gift to get your uke obsessed love one for Christmas. (Or what you might like to get for yourself because everyone else is getting you socks).

Ukulele Strings

A good set of strings is the fastest and cheapest way to improve the sound of any ukulele. But if you’re buying them for someone else, be careful. Type in ‘ukulele strings’ on eBay and you’ll get a dizzying variety.

One particular problem is buying the right size. If the person you’re buying them for has a number of ukuleles, you don’t need to worry - they’ll probably have one of each size. If they’re a relatively new player, your best bet is to buy strings for a soprano ukulele.

The most popular brands of uke strings are Worth and Aquila. If you’re lucky enough to come across some KoAloha pink strings, get them and send them to me.

Ukulele Tuner: Intelli IMT-500 Tuner

“Ever tried tuning in a room with lots of noise or in the dark?” asks musicguymic.

I can’t say that tuning my ukulele in the dark is a big problem for me. Tuning in a noisy environment, however, is. The Intelli tuner clips on to the end of the uke and picks up the pitch by vibration of the uke itself - avoiding any confusion with ambient sound.

It’s a chromatic tuner i.e. you can tune to any pitch you want. This means that, as well as ukes, it can be used to tune guitars, mandolins, banjos etc.

The cheapest I’ve seen these advertised is musicguymic on eBay.

The perfect present for: those who torture you with out of tune playing, ukulele group members, regular live players, buskers, multi-instrumentalists, those with noisy kids/housemates, those who play the uke while potholing.

Humidifier

One for the serious uke player, this. Because they’re made of wood, ukuleles can warp and crack over time as they dry out. Humidifiers stop this happening.

Someone who’s getting their first, cheap ukulele doesn’t need a humidifier. But if you know someone lucky enough to be getting a good quality uke (particularly a vintage one), I’m sure they’d be very pleased to get a wax and humidifer set to go along with it.

The perfect present for: a uke collector, someone’s who’s getting an expensive uke for xmas.

Metronome

I’m very guilty of speeding up as I play (and generally wandering out of time) and so are many players. I know I should use a metronome but I don’t. It’s probably because I’ve only got a nasty little, electronic metronome that emits a sharp ‘bip’. If I had a nice vintage metronome, I might use it as often as I should.

The sexiest metronomes on eBay at the moment:

Cadenzia Palmer Pocket Metronome

Baldwin Tempo-Matic Metronome (yes, it’s electronic - but it’s gorgeous).

Ukulele Felt Picks

Guitar picks are death to ukuleles. They sound too harsh. Felt picks are made for the uke’s more delicate disposition. Besides, they’re a cheap stocking filler.

Perfect for: recovering guitarists.

More Christmas gifts for ukulele players.

If this is your first visit here, you can find the chords/tab in those posts by clicking on the song title in red.

Get Good Tone: Making Martins Out of Mahalos

Of all the ten commandments, the one I find most difficult to live by is, “Thy shalt not covet thy neighbour’s uke.” I’ve often found myself browsing eBay or YouTube, ogling the ukes of others and contemplating harvesting the organs of my uglier children to raise the cash to buy one. But my moral compass got the better of me. So how do you get a better sounding ukulele without shelling out for one?

1. Holding the ukulele

I’ve seen it suggested that you should hold the uke by smushing it into your chest; that is entirely the wrong way to go about it. Being so small, it’s easy to smother all the tone out of a ukulele. You want to be touching the ukulele as little as possible. You need to allow the front and back of the uke to vibrate as much as possible to wring all the tone and volume out of it as possible.

Watch how the masters like Jake Shimabukuro and Roy Smeck hold it. They have the uke angled away from the body and their forearm resting very gently on the corner of the uke. The area of the uke they are touching is very small and mostly limited to the corners.

2. Use good strings

The quality of strings you use can have a huge effect on the sound of the ukulele. Buying top of the range strings is far more affordable than buying a top of the range uke and can yield almost as much of an improvement in tone. Aquila and Worth strings are generally considered the best ukulele strings around. But I still love my pink KoAloha strings. Find more about ukulele strings here.

3. Find the sweet spot

The place where you strum the uke can have a big impact on how it sounds. If you strum close to the bridge (where the strings are tied on), then you’ll get a very thin, reedy sound. Each uke has it’s own sweet spot but it’s usually somewhere around the point where the neck meets the body.

4. Don’t use a guitar pick.

The number one mistake guitar players make when transferring to uke is hacking away at the uke strings with a thumping great rhino’s toenail. Guitar plectrums are far too hard for nylon uke strings (you can just about get away with it on steel strings) and as a consequence they make a harsh sound. If you have to use a pick, use the dedicated ukulele felt picks.

5. Look after your uke.

Ukes react very badly to humidity. If you’ve got a cheap instrument you may not want to fork out for a humidifier but don’t leave your uke on a sunny windowsill or near a heater. The latest edition of UkeCast (episode 222 - the number of a third of the beast) has a list of tips for looking after your uke (I did not know that suncream can damage ukuleles).

So you might not be able to make a Mahalo sound like a vintage Martin ukulele (that was just an excuse for a very tenuous pun) but you can certainly improve the sound it makes.

Do you have have any other tone tips?

My YouTube Videos

I’ve finally got round to uploading a couple of videos to YouTube. I’d resisted previously due to my embarrassement at the hideous facial gurning I do when playing. But there were a couple tunes that required more than an mp3 to get the full effect.

I had to demonstrate the KoAloha Pink Crystal Colored Ukulele Strings generously given to me by the lovely Jenny Flame. And, well, you can see for yourself why the Smeck tribute above had to be a video.

Let me know what you think.