Hello steemians! Welcome to my page, eh!
In my last post, I told you about my trip to Appleton, Wisconsin to go to the Echos of the Past historical trade fair. The trade fair was held on Saturday and Sunday. We drove down to Appleton on Friday afternoon with hotel reservations at the local Motel 6, that beats driving 3 hours and then going to the event. Another nice thing about driving down a day early and staying overnight is that you have time to do some shopping on Friday evening.
One of the places that I wanted to go to in Appleton was a music store. Heid Music is right downtown in Appleton, on College Avenue, the main through street, it's easy to find. I wanted to stop there to see if they had any baritone ukuleles in stock. The local music store where I live has the smaller ukuleles, but not the baritone ukulele. I wanted to try one out and see what they sound like and how they play. As it happened, they had 2 of the baritone ukuleles in stock, so I got to play them both. Of course, I ended up buying one of them. As it happened, I lucked out and got some expert advise on the ukuleles. Katie DeNure, the music teacher who has her music school in the Heid Music building, just happened to be between lessons, so I got a chance to talk to her for a few minutes about the ukuleles.
If you would like to know more about her, she has a youtube channel called "One Music School" where you can find a lot of information about playing the ukulele.
The ukulele that I ended up buying is made by Cordoba, the model is 20BM. I believe this ukulele is made entirely of mahogany except for the fret board. I decided to take a few pictures to show you the 2 ukuleles that I now have. The smaller ukulele is made by Lanikai, it is a tenor ukulele. The model is MA-CET. This is also a mahogany ukulele.
As you can see, the baritone ukulele is larger than the tenor ukulele. The light is a bit better in this picture.
The headstocks.
The wood on the back of both of these instruments is really pretty nice.
The tenor ukulele is the largest of the 3 small ukuleles, the concert is in the middle, and the soprano ukulele is the smallest one. I can't play a soprano ukulele, the frets are too close together for my fingers. I can just barely play a concert ukulele, that's why I bought the tenor, I was able to play the chords on it without too much difficulty.
One of the main differences between the smaller ukuleles and the baritone ukulele is the tuning. The strings on the 3 smaller ukuleles are tuned 5 frets higher than the 4 smaller strings on a guitar. The baritone ukulele is tuned the same way as a guitar, high E, B, G, and D. Since the ukulele has 4 strings, the A and the low E string are not there. The finger positions are the same on both the smaller ukuleles and the baritone ukulele, but they make different chords. The open D on the baritone ukulele is the same as the open D on the guitar. That chord position on the smaller ukuleles makes a G chord. If you can play one, you can play the other, except that the chords that you play are different. So far, that's been a bit confusing for me, when switching from one ukulele to the other, but I'm getting better at remembering which chord to play for a song on which instrument.
Well, that's all I have for this post, I hope you found it interesting!
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them in the comment section, I usually always respond to comments or questions.
Thanks for stopping by my page to check out my post, eh!