hello world!

this is an (experimental) website dedicated to a 4-stringed instrument: the ukulele.

“as if we had not yet enough of these pages” one might think – and you are correct. in fact i am was just messing around a bit on a new hosting platform. but i didn’t like the idea of using dummy texts and the like all over the place so i went for something more inspiring – and who knows, maybe i will really start blogging ukulele related stuff here…

the domain name was inspired by one of my hobbies: ukulele playing. that’s it.

despite some affiliate links eventually being spread over the website this is a private and non-profit web presence without any commercial background.

ukulele related

my random collection of topics related to ukulele in general – whatever i found worth spending some thoughts on.

flight tiny6 mini amplifier

flight tiny6 mini amplifier

one of those unnecessary necessities i always wanted: a portable mini amplifier for all occasions, battery powered and small enough to fit in a gigbag or whatever – and not breaking the bank. the friendly folks from ukesupply.de announced it on facebook and an hour later i had already placed my order. the factory specs…

ukulele import to the eu

ukulele import to the eu

brexit has put a customs border between some well-known british ukulele suppliers and many of their customers – as a result, many people now have to consider customs duties when buying stuff from the uk. as a rule of thumb one could add ~25% to the foreign invoice amount equivalent in € for all charges….

knots and ties – how to prevent strings from slipping

knots and ties – how to prevent strings from slipping

in this post i concentrate on string fixing only – a common challenge during string change. this is how i do it, feel free to add your method in the comments.

ortega standard soprano case oucstd-so

ortega standard soprano case oucstd-so

i‘m still was in the market for a soprano hardcase which doesn’t break the bank and yet fits nicely. after the kinsman seemed too big i gave the ortega case a try… it looks pretty similar from the outside – after all it is just another black standard soprano hardcase, so what would you expect….

planet waves micro soundhole tuner (pw-ct-15 ns)

planet waves micro soundhole tuner (pw-ct-15 ns)

after falling in love with the ct-12 micro headstock tuner i thought it would be about time to have a look at the soundhole version and how that one fits to my ukuleles. note that ct-15 is the “standard” (guitar) version of the micro soundhole tuner, d’addario also have a dedicated ukulele version, the pw-ct-22….

kinsman kus10 soprano hardcase

kinsman kus10 soprano hardcase

need some more protection than just a gigbag and don’t want to spend a fortune? then this might be for you….

worth medium

worth medium

i don’t have any tension values, just taking a quick note of string diameters for worth medium strings. these values are apparently valid for clear and brown strings for tenor and concert scales. A4 0,52mm (0,0205″) E4 0,66mm (0,0260″) C4 0,74mm (0,0291″) C5 0,47mm (0,0185″) G3 0,91mm (0,0358″) G4 0,57mm (0,0224″) full string specifications (resp…

quickstart for guitar players (dgbe tuning) on ukulele (gcea tuning)

quickstart for guitar players (dgbe tuning) on ukulele (gcea tuning)

i would assume it is commonly known that guitar and ukulele have some things in common – apart from the 8-shape. i am referring to the tuning intervals of the strings. standard guitar tuning is eadgbe, standard ukulele tuning is gcea – and believe it or not: the string intervals are the same :-). ukulele…

notefinder aka another fretboard map

notefinder aka another fretboard map

there’s plenty of fretboard maps out there, showing which note is where on the fretboard of your ukulele. but all of these graphical maps omit the octave, they show only the note names – which can lead to slightly unwanted results… as this disturbed me for quite some time now i finally decided to quickly…

howto add a strap button to the firefly banjolele

howto add a strap button to the firefly banjolele

sometimes a strap comes in handy – but on the original firefly there’s hardly any good mounting point to attach a strap. big banjoleles come with lots of possibilities, just the firefly lacks one. and i do not consider fiddling some shoelace through the tailpiece a good solution, not even a workaround. fortunately the tailpiece…

project: “bass” ukulele

project: “bass” ukulele

one might ask: why “project”, the ubass has already been introduced? looking closer, the question already contains the answer: the ubass (and all its variants) is in fact not an ukulele but a small scale bass. most obvious proof is the tuning: ukulele is tuned gcea (or adf#b) – ubass is tuned eadg which is…

ASCII Art: Ukulele

ASCII Art: Ukulele

you never know when you will need this, e.g. in a forum signature… basic ukulele ( o )==:: advanced (soprano and concert) ukulele incl bridge (a turkish character, code #305;) (ı o)==:: ( ıo )===:: a fluke | ıo >==:: [ ıo >==:: a flea |ıo )==:: [ıo )==:: a banjolele (ı )===:: another one (found on…

coming soon: plastic ukulele

coming soon: plastic ukulele

i couldn’t resist when i saw this koki’o transparent plastic soprano – maybe i will found an underwater ukulele group one day. the only non-plastic parts are the tuners, all the rest should be 100% waterproof. apparently plastic ukuleles are on the raise again, targetting the lower end of the price scale whilst promising a…

ukulele tuning pitches

ukulele tuning pitches

i found a great picture of a full piano keyboard (made by phillip kuhrt based on an original by sergey pushkin) on wikimedia; look at the different ukulele tunings in relation to each other: ubass: E A D G baritone: D G B E“standard” ukulele (tenor, concert, soprano): G (low or high) C E A“alternate”…

planet waves micro headstock tuner (pw-ct-12)

planet waves micro headstock tuner (pw-ct-12)

i already have a few of the previous model (planet waves mini) living on the various headstocks of my ukes, and now I gave the new model by d’addario a try: it is an excellent example of how even good things can be improved. slightly smaller than the previous model 3-color display (red=off, yellow=almost, green=in…

link collection

link collection

i don’t want to maintain a super long list of external links in the side menu, but still i need some kind of notepad for useful links. here we go – unordered for the time being… ukulele setup ukulele setup at hawaii music supply: http://youtu.be/adeFF0nQyzM spongebob tutorial part I: http://youtu.be/Zbp7dApxAuE part II: http://youtu.be/SGGz14ohX9Y fretcalculator: https://www.stewmac.com/FretCalculator…

inventory

ukuleles i played, ukuleles i owned, ukuleles i found interesting enough to write about. articles are dated with date of purchase for a chronological view.

pepe romero jr’s tiny ukuleles have a very distinct look – when you see one there is no second thought about the brand. somehow they seem to attempt to get the maximum sound out of minimum size, kind of opposite to all the longneck ukuleles out there. the stc ...
more 
01 Dec 2021
made in japan in very limited numbers from only the highest grade hawaiian koa this ukulele looks almost to good to be played, even though the sound and playability really match the appearance. despite what the logo says they only started building ukuleles in 1957 and sin...
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before i saw this instrument in a review on gotaukulele.com i did not even know 8-strings existed in concert scale. i love my pono, but i still struggle with the tenor scale every now and then. so the combination of 8-string sound with my preferred concert scale sounds al...
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one of a limited series to commemorate the 25th anniversary of koaloha. based on their famous ktm-00 with a few birthday upgrades. it features the special koaloha bracing on the inside of a carefully selected premium koa body with ebony bridge, fretboard and headstock pla...
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flight ukulele have produced a limited run of only 50 of these ukuleles made in hawaii; at the same time they made another ten from koa (model wus-4). one of the fifty mahoganys made it to me – and i was pleasantly surprised. i’ve read some high praise, statem...
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ukulele reduced as much as possible: this one is merely a fretboard with strings in concert scale built at minimum overall length. specifications body, neck: all maple, satin finish no fingerboard, frets are mounted directly on the neck; 15 frets with dot and side markers...
more 

go.4str.in

YOURLS: Your Own URL Shortenergo.4str.in is powered by yourls (your own url shortener)

if you came here to find out more about go.4str.in you have come to the right place.

i am pretty active posting stuff about ukulele in various related forums like ukulelenboard.de or ukuleleunderground.com (just to mention two). as a matter of fact people keep asking similar questions over and over again, meaning you need to point them to the same resources again and again. that’s why shortlinks are useful – you simply don’t have to remember the full url to everything.
of course i could have started using one of the more popular shortlink providers like bit.ly or tinyurl. but i am more of a diy person and thus i went for my own installation of yourls on this webserver. just for the pun of it i set up the url shortener with a “speaking” subdomain 😉
i have full control and full statistics available at my own discretion – what more could i want.

for the time being the shortlinks on go.4str.in are reserved for anything related to 4 strings.

it might happen in the future that i open up the public interface on go.4str.in and make this shortlink service available for the general public. YOURLS as such is reliable and stable enough, but spammers tend to abuse the service pretty soon; so far i have not found a fully satisfying remedy against those “funny” people. that’s why the interface is not yet public.

(Header image shamelessly copied from https://blog.yourls.org/)

disclaimer

anything posted here could be pure fiction or plain wrong – this might have happened on purpose, by coincidence or by accident. feel free to notify me about any errors you find.
some things might still be true though.
whatever you do with stuff found here is done completely under your own responsibility, not mine.

links to external sites should only lead to legal content – at least they did so at the time of linking. should that have changed in the meantime pls. leave a comment on the respective page where you found the link to notify me. external links (to sites beyond my control) throughout the text are marked for clarification; some remain unmarked as they are obviously pointing to external sites (like e.g. the social sharing buttons below).

pictures used on this site are either my own work or used with kind permission of the original authors. should you know better, let me know and i will take down the unlicensed content.
some of the background images are taken from pixabay – a great source of free (cc0 license) images.

trademarks and copyrights are respected even when not explicitly marked as such.

google analytics is not used to track your visit. nevertheless it could happen that this site makes use of cookies. for visitor tracking i recommend using matomo instead – or one of the multiple plugins available for wordpress. actually i am using matomo on this site, hosted on the very same server in the EU.

matomo says:

privacy

new european legislation enforced as of 25 may 2018 forces me to provide a whole lot of detailed legalese information which can be found in the privacy policy.

in a nutshell: this is a private, non-commercial website. any information collected about site visitors (e.g. ip address) is collected for defense against spam and statistical purposes only and anonymized before storage. i don’t care who you are as long as you don’t try to leave spam or to interfere maliciously with my website.

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