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So my recent ukulele post talked all about my nephew and his ukulele. Actually, it was more about missing my guitar while I was on vacation, but my nephew got me thinking about ukuleles.

The thing that I forgot to mention about ukuleles… and I am really out of my element here because I have never strummed a ukulele a single time… is that there are different sizes. From looking at Musician’s Friend, there is a regular uke, a tenor uke, a concert uke, and a soprano uke. And from prior experience with musical instruments, there are probably some others that I don’t know about yet.

So this is the cool thing in terms of me missing my guitar… from what my nephew says, the tenor ukulele (which is a bit bigger than a regular uke) is sorta like playing the first four strings on a guitar. They are the same notes on a guitar. So if this is correct, I am wondering if the chord patterns are the same - as long as you only use chords from the first four strings (ie, such as the f chord or the d chord).

If that was the case (and I don’t know if it is, but it seems like the odds are pretty good), then I could have just run out and gotten a tenor ukulele at the beginning of me vacation, and it would have sorta been like playing the guitar. I know, a really messed up notion… but such is the mental state I am in.

My more serious guess is that getting that ukulele would have been an entirely different experience, and I would have found it valuable in its own right.

Could my guitar be replaced by a ukulele?

OK, so I am on vacation… and I am without my guitar. I already wrote about it in my last blog entry. So last week I visited a Guitar Center for the first time - and I was suitably impressed with more guitars in one place than I have ever seen.

But that was in Chicago… now I have moved on and I am sitting in a nice house on a beautiful lake in a very small town. No guitar center here. And that means I am not playing guitar at all. And it sure would be nice to have a guitar to play while I am sitting at the beach.

And then my nephew mentioned that he has been playing the ukulele for the last six months or so. Now I know almost nothing about the ukulele at all. In fact, the only thing I know about it is that one of my friends who was a role model for me learning to play guitar said that he originally started three years ago when he happened to pick up a cheap ukulele when he was on vacation in Hawaii. That led to getting a nicer ukulele, then he got a guitar.

So I got to thinking… maybe I could do the reverse evolution for a week or so - going from guitar to ukulele while I was on vacation. So I did a bit of poking around at musician’s friend, and you can get ukulele’s for REALLY cheap. I am talking about $29 to $49 - and the most expensive ones look like they are about $250 (of course, like any musical instrument, I am sure the sky is the limit).

So my question is, should I get a cheap ukulele to bang around on while I am on vacation?