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So last week I was in Las Vegas and I visited the showroom of Ed Roman Guitars. What a cool store - they claim to be the biggest guitar store in the world, and I am not about to argue. My best guess is that the showroom is two or three times the size of a Guitar Center, and it is nothing but guitars. Well, they might have some mandolins and Ukes…

but there aren’t any drums or keyboards like at Guitar Center,Guitar Center. And it felt completely different than Guitar Center - which has always felt chaotic and overly crowded (and certainly it’s always been incredibly LOUD!)

In any case, my visit to Ed Roman Guitars was really pleasant. It can be a bit crazy getting around in Vegas, but the store was really close to the Vegas strip. The cab ride from the Venetian was less than $10. And it was close enough to the strip that we were able to get a return cab ride pretty easily as well.

We got a lot of patient help, and every time I wanted to try a guitar, the person helping us (Scott) pulled it down for us and made sure it was tuned before I started playing. That is a pleasant switch from pretty much any other guitar store I have been in.

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?