The idea started with having an instrument for the maker’s four-year-old daughter and turned into a concert-sized ukulele that’s collecting design awards. Made from an new bio-based composite material called Ekoa, the Blackbird Clara is an innovative new ukulele from…
Let us be the first to say, the Seagull Merlin—it is not a ukulele. It’s not even an instrument that really existed before Seagull invented what it calls the “strummable dulcimer,” but it’s so charming and user-friendly that ukulele players…
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…
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…
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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…
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…
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.
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…
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Review of the Cordoba 22T and Cordoba 22C ukuleles.
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…