Friday, December 26, 2008

Screwkulele

We got a ukulele in at the store a while ago that came with a book and extra strings. My son and I have been wanting one so I bought it for Christmas. It's crap. I suspected it might be, because it seemed on the cheap side. Not that I go around pricing ukuleles, but it seemed pretty cheap. So I got what I paid for. Tomorrow it gets returned. It needs a fret that it was never given. It sounded like ass when I tuned it by ear yesterday. Today I went online at Pineapple Pete's Uke School, which seems like a pretty handy site for a beginner, and tuned each string to the notes there and then it sounded a hell of a lot better. That is, until I tried a couple chords. As soon as you finger a note, it's out of tune with the open strings. What a mess. Now I'll look around music stores for a real uke.

5 comments:

Church said...

Did you Ask Twitter?

Church said...

Scrap that. AskMeFi (and MeFi)

Matthew Sanborn Smith said...

Thanks, Church, that's exactly the kind of info I was looking for.

Diane Severson said...

cool! I just loved the episode of Brady Bunch in Hawaii when what's-his-name? played a Ukelele. Did you know that the Uke is the new recorder in school music programs? At least it is in the UK. I was shocked! I can only imagine the cacophony.

Matthew Sanborn Smith said...

Don Ho! I still haven't gotten around to actually shopping for the new uke. The boy will get impatient eventually and push me to the music store. I think ukes in schools is a great idea. You could graduate to a guitar instead of a clarinet.

My friend Ernie Renner and I joined recorder class in 4th grade solely to watch Natasha McCain stick her recorder up her nose, which she did on a regular basis. We were eventually thrown out of the class for laughing too much.

Beware the Tiki idol!