A New Uke for the New Year

Just before Christmas, we took a family vacation to Maui. As is always the case when I visit Hawaii, I got ukulele tunes and all sorts of Hawaiian music stuck in my head, which is such an integral part of the whole experience and part of what makes the islands so relaxing.

As we were leaving, my wife thought it would be fun to buy my daughter a toy ukulele as a souvenir. And I agreed. So we picked one up from downtown Lahaina on our way to the airport.  While my daughter loves her little pink uke, at some point I expressed some mild disappointment that the instrument didn't really hold it's tuning very well. So it wasn't really playable as a real instrument.  My wife heard this and rectified the situation by surprising me with a ukulele of my own on Christmas morning!

She did a good job finding a solid instrument at a reasonable price. Apparently, the local music store was running low on inventory before the holidays, saying that ukulele's have been pretty popular this season. I wonder how much of the recent surge in popularity has been due to this song?

I love my solid-wood, Kala concert ukulele. I've been playing with it over my Christmas vacation and will hopefully be able to record something soon that I can post. As there are only four strings on a ukulele, the chord formations are fairly easy to learn for a guitarist. What takes the most getting used to is how to hold such a small instrument.

Happy new year!