Gear Reviews

Collings UC1 Concert & UT2K Tenor Ukuleles

By Adam Perlmutter [Editor’s note: Collings has put ukulele production on hiatus since this review appeared.] In its four-decade history, Collings Guitars has made smart, modern interpretations of the widest range of golden-era guitar designs—acoustic and electric, flattop and archtop—not…

These LuLus Are Real Head Turners

It can be hard being the guy that brings a ukulele to a jam session. Though true lovers of the jumping flea know what joy the instrument can bring, they also know the pain of the groans and guffaws it…

Two Kala Tenors Up For Review

By Breeze Kinsey / Excerpted from Ukulele No. 6, Fall 2014 The word kala has a handful of meanings in Hawaiian. According to Mike Upton, the founder of Kala Brand ukuleles, the connotations range from “a unicorn fish” to “slang for…

D’Addario Planet Waves NS Ukulele CapoPro

As with many parents of small children, the last several months of my life have been filled with songs from Disney’s animated film Frozen. The story of two sisters coming into their own has struck a chord with my little…

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Kala UBASS-SSMHG-FS and Bakithi Kumalo Signature U-Bass

If there's any instrument that can match the ukulele for soul-stirring goodness and deep emotional power, it's the bass. The folks at Kala must have felt that way, too, because when the company created the U-Bass by mixing ukulele and bass together in one instrument, it was a genius move up there with combining chocolate and peanut butter.

National Reso-Phonic Style O

Even before the rise of that demon electricity, our forebears craved more volume from their acoustic instruments. In the process of looking for loudness, they tried many solutions, like building larger instruments or stealing the archtop idea from the violin…

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…

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Rick Turner Compass Rose Style-C Tenor

When it comes to making instruments, Rick Turner is a man of unbridled enthusiasm. He simply loves searching through the dustbins of history for the best ideas and synthesizing those with his own concepts to make singular guitars, basses, and…