Lanikai SOTTU-T Tenor Thinline and LUTU-21S

Lanikai smelled something fishy about ukuleles and spent the last three years working on a way to improve the instrument’s intonation. Borrowing from decades of guitar design innovations and focusing it on the jumping flea, they came up with a system that uses both a compensated nut and individual string saddles to achieve a high degree of tuning accuracy.

They call it TunaUke Technology and rolled it out to two of the company’s popular lines at this year’s NAMM show. The first line to receive the added attention is the afford- able, all-nato LUTU line, represented here by the LUTU-21S soprano, and the fancier spruce-topped SP series, shown off by the more glamorous, limited-edition SOTTU-T Thinline.

Will it make a splash or is it a flop? I put two models to the test.