What's the difference between a $20 ukulele and a $1000 ukulele

[StVincent]

@chgoliz

There are ukuleles in the $100-200 range that sound a lot better than a $20 one and not that much worse than the $1,000 option.

I find 120 is a perfectly serviceable price point myself.

[PipRLagenta]

How do electric ukuleles fit into the equation?

[nasruddin]

Only Segovia can play a cheap guitar.

[generic_name]

This kind of thing depends on the maker. There are $20 ukes that are unplayable crap and won’t last a year, and $20 ukes that are sturdy enough to last a long time. Even a $1000 instrument won’t survive being abused (and this is one of the pluses for owning a cheap instrument-- you’re not afraid to subtract any of it’s investment value by bringing it to a hootenanny where it might get abused, or a gig where it might get stolen.)

[Old]

One of my buddies got his three-year old a uke to fool with. The kid went Pete Townsend on it within an hour. At that point he felt real good about it being a $20 model.

[nemomen]

If he was moving up the neck you’d hear the difference much more since the intonation and action would come into play. I hop up past the 5th fret a lot, and on a cheap uke it’s agony. If you’re just playing open chords a cheap uke is okay - the high action is still going to hurt your fingers a bit more, and probably the lack of projection is a bonus when the tuning drifts while you’re playing.

Also, not all $20 ukes are equal, some are surprisingly good for the price, others truly horrible.

[billstewart]

First of all, double the price for cheap ukes if you’re on the mainland and not in Hawaii - over there, it’s worth spending $15 at the ABC Store instead of $10, and often worth spending $30 instead of $15, because that usually gets you geared tuners instead of simple pegs. Either way, spend the next $10 on strings if you want. I’ve also got a couple of $100 soprano ukes that sound good (though one has a buzz I’m going to need to fix), and my concert and tenor both cost under $100 but sound a lot better, and have wood that’s good enough to be varnished rather than painted. (The baritone I bought on eBay, so the $20 I spent was a random number; I’d guess it was probably $100-200 new.)

[Donald_Petersen]

@MrKahuna

I can drive a nail with a $0 rock. It’s not much fun.

More fun than driving it by hand, I guess.

[MikeTheBard]

I tend to find that there are certain wide price points that don’t have much difference between the outside ends of the bracket- For example, with guitars,

Pretty much anything under $200 is garbage
Most of what’s in the $300-$800 range is pretty similar to each other
$1200 gets you quality, but most people aren’t going to notice the differences between that bracket and the $3000+ bracket.

[telecinese]

@japhroaig

I have literally played every single instrument in the world without exception

Wow. Sounds challenging, with all the weird new ones being invented all the time. I’d watch your TED talk on it.

@japhroaig

(which ihave had every bottle of in the world)

Oh. Never mind.

@japhroaig

there is a rapid diminished return based on price.

Isn’t that true for most manufactured things, though? The difference between a crappy $1X bicycle/wallet/knife/phone/whatever and pretty good $10X one is always more significant, it seems to me, than the difference between the pretty good $10X one and the luxury $100X one.

Edit. Boy, I even sound like a GURPS rulebook from reading many of them at an impressionable age.

[Cunk]

He should spend the money saved on a microphone.

[Richard_Kirk]

My daughter was wanting a uke, so I went down Denmark Street (London) an looked in the shops. The most expensive one was £6400, though I am not even sure it was even for sale. Most of the basic wooden ones came in at about £20. There were also plastic ones, and some people actually recommended the plastic 'Dennis the Menace" (UK version) over the wood ones. The fancy ones with round backs look lovely but are much harder to hold. The expensive ones are often made of some bonkers Hawaiian wood, which looks like really unconvincing plastic laminate. As Hawaii is not particularly blessed with regular trees, maybe regular wood is better.

As far as I can see, the uke is largely a rigid shape, a bit like a trumpet; and trumpets have a fairly tight price band (few hundred, new, to a few thousand).

You can’t always go by the recorded sound. There are soprano and alto ukeleles which have the same tuning, but the soprano is made to have more overtones, and a more penetrating sound. If he had said his cheap one was an alto, and the expensive one was a soprano, then that would explain the difference. But he said the cheap one was a sop. Go figure.

[Mindysan33]

I have one that was around $100, and another which was around $20. Both held their tune rather well for the most part. The more expensive one does have a… I dunno, richer sound? But I still like my $20 uke.

That being said, I’d kind of love a national - pricey though they are:

http://www.nationalguitars.com/instruments/ukemahogany/mahogany.html

[anon33466019]

@telecinese

I’d watch your TED talk on it.

In all honesty I think I could come up with a really engaging TED talk on the history of indigenous and imported Celtic instruments. Also, did I mention I have a copy of Benade as well as boehms treatise on cylindrical wind instruments on my night stand? (Aren’t they both fucking. Good? Benade can be preachy and boehm can be… Vague, but dayum)

[generic_name]

I’ve been eyeballing those cheaper all metal resophonic ukes from Recording King and Gold Tone.

But then I think “OK, how many ukuleles do I really need?” and “shouldn’t I start learning to play that banjo I bought?”

[anon34812172]

How’s your berimbau?

[anon34812172]

@japhroaig

Benade as well as boehms treatise on cylindrical wind instruments on my night stand? (Aren’t they both fucking

’
You think they were like, ya know? Playing cylindrical wind instruments together?

[anon33466019]

Right? Benade spent most of his words on tapers.

[some_guy]

With a lot of cheap instruments, the tuning problems are easily fixed with new tuners (and for a uke you can get geared Grover tuners for $10, sometimes less).

A lot of old Japanese cheap guitars (Teisco, Kingston, Kawai, etc.) were considered junk for a long time, then when people started trading out the tuners for new reliable replacements (sometimes changing the bridge too, for better intonation), they started getting played by a lot of serious musicians (David Lindley, Ry Cooder, Jackson Brown). Subway Guitars in Berkeley CA made the technique kind of popular.

[nemomen]

If you’re going to buy a $20 Uke and swap the tuners you’re already in the price range of a safer bet, and the cheap ones can have problems that you just can’t fix like terrible action and bad intonation. For a cheap Uke you’d be much better off going for a $40-50 model, putting some decent strings on it (Aquila NylGuts are excellent), and swapping the tuners if you need to. A Kala/Makala or is a decent cheap enough Uke that won’t have the action and intonation nightmares that the really cheap models have.