Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Baritone ukulele versatility

I don't have a lot of experience playing the ukulele.

It was in 2011 that I started playing around with my sister's concert ukulele.  I was new to guitar at the time, and didn't know any chords on the uke, but it was pretty easy to play when she showed me a few.

It was 6 months later, in the spring after my first semester in graduate school that I bought my first ukulele, to go along with the acoustic guitar I'd been playing to relax myself after work/school at night.

My first uke was a little Kala Makala tenor (MK-T).  I played it with the stock strings for a few years before finally replacing them.  My guitar playing is not great by any stretch of the imagination, and I loved that the uke let me play chords like 'F' much more easily than on the guitar, so I could play many more songs without dealing with crazy transpositions.

The fingerings for the chords were all different of course, since the tenor/concert/soprano are all tuned differently than the guitar.  No problem though, there are only 4 strings, so it came pretty quickly--the nylon strings were much easier to play in comparison to steel too!

I finally picked up a baritone after a few years of searching.  And I've found that it's basically the perfect instrument to act as bridge to both the guitar and the other sizes of ukulele.

  1. The baritone ukulele is tuned the same as the highest four strings on the guitar.  If you learn chords on the baritone, you will have an easy transition to the guitar, only needing to add two more strings.
  2. If you learn chords on the baritone and want to play other ukuleles, YOU CAN!  The chords will be different, but the fingerings still all correspond to chords.  Perhaps you learned a song on your baritone, but want to try your friend's concert--you can play the song exactly the same, it will just be a transposed version.
  3. Ukes tend to be a little cheaper than guitars.  The first one I bought was around $80 and I've been playing it non-stop for three years now.  I opted to go with a higher quality one for my baritone and have been very happy with it--you get what you pay for, but the barrier to entry is pretty low.
P.S. the Kala KA-B sounds like magic.  Gives me shivers.

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