Ukulele Sessions Presents Andrew Molina

By Greg Olwell

While on a West Coast tour, Maui’s own Andrew Molina stopped by with his father Jay Molina to perform for this Ukulele Session. Andrew, who was also named as one of our five artists to watch, reports that he’s already been in the studio working on the follow up to his 2013 album, The Beginning, and recently finished a Kickstarter campaign to help finance the record he hopes to have completed for early next year.

Andrew played three songs on his session, with his father Jay backing him up on two songs using a 5-string bass. The first is an original that’s going to be on the new album, but doesn’t yet have a title, and a second piece that will be familiar to fans of Game of Thrones. The third song is called “Last Moments.” [UPDATE: The album was released and the untitled song is now called “Hualalai.”]

On his session, Andrew played two tenor-sized Kamakas. On the first two tracks he uses a stunning, gorgeous high-G tenor he picked up a few weeks before this session after waiting two years for his dream uke to come true. The uke was made by Casey Kamaka using all curly koa, with blue paua shell inlays about the body, neck, and on the fingerboard. It has a Fishman pickup and D’Addario strings.

For the last song, he used a recent Kamaka tenor (with spruce top and koa back and sides), setup with GHS Bari-Tenor re-entrant strings, which turned his tenor into a baritone.

Visit Andrew’s site, andrewmolinaukulele.com to check out his music, or find it in on Amazon, iTunes, or CD Baby.

Andrew also performed for our cameras during the NAMM show in January 2016.

https://dev.ukulelemag.com/uketube/andrew-molina-winter-namm-2016

https://dev.ukulelemag.com/stories/the-next-jake-5-up-and-coming-hawaiian-artists-to-watch