Friday, July 27, 2018

My Little Guitalele

A while back on a whim I purchased a soprano ukulele. It was overpriced and it wouldn't stay in tune and it took me all of like an hour to figure out how to play it.

Basically a ukulele is the first four strings of a guitar at the 5th fret. So you're using the same chord configurations for a guitar if you had a capo at the 5th fret and were only using the first four strings. Easy peasy, except for trying to remember that G is really C and so on.

I told my husband that if I were still fiddling with the ukulele in a month, I would buy a better instrument.

The month came and I started looking around for a better ukulele. During my search, I discovered that there is a six-string instrument called a guitalele. It's basically a guitar except tuned at, again, the 5th fret. So your strings are running A to A instead of E to E.

Only one local store had a guitalele listed in its inventory, and when I called it actually wasn't there, so I couldn't see if I would really like one. I listened to several different brands online and decided the one that sounded the best to me was a Gretch (G9126) guitalele. You can here what I heard at this link.

Anyway, I ordered one.

Here is my little Gretch guitalele with my Taylor GS Mini guitar. The guitar is smaller than a parlor-sized guitar, so the guitalele is much smaller than a big ol' dreadnaught guitar or even a regular parlor-sized guitar.


These call these guitaleles "travel guitars" because they are so small that they can be stowed away very easily. Great for taking on vacation, for example.

The Gretch guitalele has a flat fretboard, much like the fretboard on my Takamine classical guitar. Since I play alone and not with anyone, I haven't had to worry about transposing and I simply pick it up and play it like a guitar. The only issue is my singing - I generally sing in D or A which means if I play in D or A then I'm not in the right key; I need to drop D back to A and A up C or something like that.

The overpriced ukulele, meanwhile, is scheduled to become a wall decoration.

1 comment:

  1. I have never heard of a guitalele so I learned something new today! Thank you!! I did listen to the video link you posted and the sound is great! Have fun!!

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for dropping by! I appreciate comments and love to hear from others. I appreciate your time and responses.