Once again, I’ve bought a Ukulele. This one came from Amazon and cost me £13.95. Here it is sitting on the horrible sofa, next to one of my older ones. The new one is the purple one on the left.
And quite a lovely little thing it is too. Theres nary a blemish on it’s finish, and it has been holding it’s tuning. This is mainly due to having proper guitar heads with worm-screws, not just the usual tat you seem to find on ukuleles.
I recommend you go and buy one. Now!
Now this post is entitled “Adventures in Ukulele Tuning”, not “Buy this Ukulele and earn me a few pennies”, so what is this tuning business about?
Well, usually a ukulele is tuned GCEA (C tuning) or ADF#B (D tuning), and I already have one for each. This new little purple bugger was bought solely for the purpose of stringing it DGBE (G tuning), in a manner similar to the high four strings of a guitar (you know, the 4 closest to the ground, yet highest in pitch).
It would seem from the outset that new strings are in order, however this is my botch-job workaround:
Take the middle two strings of the current (GCEA) tuning, and re-use them as the top two strings of the new tuning (DGBE). i.e. the C and E strings are now doing service as the B and E strings. The B is sounding a little dull, but it’ll do for now.
Get the old broken nylon-strung acoustic out of the wardrobe. The old G string from that will be pressed into service as the new G string. Sure it sounds a little dull, but it’ll do for now (again).
Finally, take the B string from the old acoustic and use that as the D string.
This will all do as a stop-gap measure until I can be bothered to get off my arse and down to the music shop to buy the proper strings. More to follow, at a later date…
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