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Permalink Reply by john mackay on July 8, 2015 at 11:02pm

oh drawn a blank have we!

I know it may sound a daft question.

you've got to remember that I'm not knowledgeable on these kind of things.

so    I take it ,its not a ukulele no matter how small it is?.

also I ask a question or two on the soap bar pick up again no reply.

I never knew that a soap bar pick up existed till now.

I thought they were all the same.

seeing that I get little response on here so I shan't bother you lot again with questions.

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Permalink Reply by JL on July 8, 2015 at 11:30pm

just a guess, but since a ukelele is a sub-member of the class guitar which is sub-member of the class lute, I would say it becomes a ulelele when you decide it is...

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Permalink Reply by darryl kernaghan on July 9, 2015 at 1:07am

i,m far from an expert,but apart from being generally smaller,the major difference appears to be strings and tunings,ukes generally have nylon strings and are tuned i think,a full octave higher,effectively,your guitar and uke in the cigar box mode are almost interchangeable,someone who REALLY knows the difference may be able to help

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Permalink Reply by King Rubbish on July 9, 2015 at 7:33am

Well, my take on it is this...  

All fretted stringed instruments (that I can think of) are bound by the same theories of scale length, fret placement etc. to the extent that they are all basically variations on a theme.  A uke and a bass guitar are really the same thing but scaled up or down, the only difference being the notes that the strings are tuned to and the intervals between those notes.  This is true for guitar, banjo, dulcimer, violin and everything else, fretted or fretless.  Of course when you walk into a music shop it's easy to see the difference in the conventional instruments, but the with the kind of homebrewed stuff people are making here the boundaries often blur and you end up with something that sits between the normal categories.  

Regarding ukuleles specifically, they are tuned like the top four strings of a standard guitar only to a higher pitch.  If you take the lowest two strings off that guitar and capo at the fifth fret - instant uke!  So all your standard guitar chords will work just fine minus the two bass strings.  To go the other way, a baritone uke is tuned exactly like the top strings of the guitar, no different at all, so... 

To answer the question, whether a 20" three string instrument would be a 'short scale guitar' or a 'long scale uke' is tricky to say, it could feasibly be either.  Personally I would build it, see what kind of vibe it gave me, and then revel in that fact that I'd made something that defies convention - no rules, right!? 

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Permalink Reply by john mackay on July 9, 2015 at 7:58am

ok thanks

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