Why play the ukulele?

Hi! I'm Elaine. I've been playing ukulele since 2017, and you can find my ukulele tutorials on Youtube. There are many great reasons to play the ukulele! This post discusses reasons to play the ukulele.

Instruments to accompany singing

Singing is a great way to express yourself and your emotions. However, just one voice by itself can sound lonely. Which instruments can accompany your singing on the go?

Woodwind and brass instruments are out - if you're blowing a flute, you can't use your voice to sing at the same time. What about piano? Unfortunately, pianos are not very portable.

In general, lutes are great for accompanying singing. A lute is a stringed instrument you hold and strum - think ukuleles, guitars, banjos, etc. Lutes also tend to be (relatively) small and portable.

For me, I started out playing guitar through free guitar lessons in college. Now, I still play guitar, but often prefer the ukulele due to its size, tone, and tuning.

Smaller size

If you have little to no music experience, an ukulele can be easier to learn than a guitar. For example, I've had a lot of success teaching complete beginners to play easy songs on ukulele in just 30 minutes.

An ukulele has 4 strings; a guitar has 6. Since an ukulele has fewer strings, beginner ukulele chords don't require as much effort to play. Ukulele strings are often softer than guitar strings, so you don't need to exert as much force. Ukuleles are also smaller than guitars and can be easier to hold.

The smaller size also makes ukuleles more portable. I've often plopped my travel, soprano ukulele into my backpack as an airplane carry-on. Soprano ukuleles are most common, smallest ukulele size. There are even smaller sopranino ukuleles, but I find that the sound quality tends to suffer for instruments that are too small.

Ukuleles are affordable. Though you can buy a very expensive ukulele (I personally have a very nice, solid koa wood ukulele), you can buy a cheap, decent ukulele for less than the price of a cheap, decent guitar. If you want to buy your first ukulele, please see this guide.

Cheery tone

Instrument tone, its perceived sound quality, is somewhat subjective. However, most people associate ukuleles with Hawaii and cheery, good vibes. Even if you play a sad song on the ukulele, it doesn't sound as dark. For example, the first song I learned on ukulele was I Will Follow You into the Dark.

Better tuning for my voice

Ukuleles and guitars are tuned differently. I mostly sing and play ukulele, and I find I prefer ukulele over guitar tuning. To figure this out, I needed to learn music theory and understand my voice. First, some vocabulary terms:

• An instrument's range is which notes the instrument can produce. Guitars and ukulele are instruments. Your voice is also an instrument.
• For our purposes, a key is a set of pitches that's the basis for Western music.

Here's a visual of instrument ranges for guitar, my voice, and ukulele. I show the ranges on a piano keyboard for ease of comparison. My voice range is E3 - E5.

Standard guitar tuning is EBGDAE. Baritone ukuleles are tuned like the bottom 4 strings of a guitar (GDAE). Because of how these instruments are set up, G major is the easiest key to play on a guitar or a baritone. Unfortunately, for me, singing songs in G major involves the very bottom of very top of my range, so it's hard to sound good.

On the other hand, standard tuning for most ukuleles (soprano, concert, tenor) is GCEA, and C major is the easiest key to play on an ukulele. Singing songs in C major involves the middle part of my range, which is the strongest.

Note that the ukulele range shown above (C4 - A5) is for an ukulele with a high G string. If you put a low G string on a ukulele, you get a slightly wider range (G3 - A5). This overlaps nicely with my vocal range, so I can use an ukulele with a low G to write melodies for songs.

Appendix

If you're a beginner, and you want to improve your singing, please see this guide on how to improve at singing for beginners. If you want to learn how to play and sing at the same time, here are some tips. For more reasons on why different people play ukulele, you can check out this Reddit thread on /r/ukulele.

MusicParsed features

This site, MusicParsed, is a better site for song chords. You can use it if you play ukulele, baritone ukulele, guitar, or guitalele. It supports both left and right-handed chord diagrams. If you're making a chord chart, you can also use this tool to get chord diagrams.

Baritone ukuleles are tuned like the bottom 4 strings of a guitar (ukulele transposed -5), and guitaleles are tuned like a guitar with CAPO 5 (guitar transposed +5). Here's a visual comparison of different lutes: