The story
This is a fun sample of my Brunswick ukulele being plucked. I received this instrument as a gift from my good friend Judith who I used to work with when I was a gap student at Beachborough School. We would teach ukulele to the kids together playing 4 chord songs such as Bob Marley – ‘Three Little Birds’ (we only knew 4 chords!)
Slap some reverb on and this can sound lovely. There is just one velocity layer. When the notes are stretched and played in it’s lower registers it has an interesting harp like quality.
This was recorded using an SM58 with a Mackie Onyx Artist 1.2
Reviews for James’ Ukulele
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Well-rounded Ukulele with a guitar range
This is now my go to Ukulele, but I definitely write with it much more like a nylon string guitar. The low end is fantastic! At times I would say it almost sounds harp like, which is really neat. I have gotten a really nice authentic ukulele sound from it, so this is perfect for anyone needing that for a project. But, if you are looking for some interesting guitar-like sounds, I'd highly recommend this! The only issue I have found, is that a few of the high end notes have that harsh 'ping' sound which is inherent with ukuleles but I had to manually turn down a select few notes that sounded harsher/louder than surrounding notes. Easy to fix and maybe it's just my personal taste and not an actual issue with recording.
A proper dry uke!
This is a very nice Ukelele patch that has the very strong point of a super good recording with no audible noise in the samples. It features a very dry sound signature, and in my opinion it sounds best when you play it on the mid range - since that's the natural range of the instrument. It won't turn heads, but it's simple enough to get you going on those hawaian tunes.
What a massive low-end presence
I agree with the other reviews, and as a harp owner, this does have reminiscent tones of a plucked harp. Where this really shines is using it as a bass ukulele in the C1 through C2 range with a wee bit of reverb. Really can bring out a bass line. It gets a little less playable above C4, though I suspect there's some sample stretching going on up there? Really can bring out quite a bit of character, though!
Really Nice tone but wish was more deeply sampled
As a guitar player i never really find instruments like this useful. The articulation always just ends up sounding unrealistic to me, more like a harp or harpsichord that a uke or guitar. With that being said i feel like this acctually sounds more realistic than some others ive heard. The real issue here is that theres no dynamics or round robins. I think guitars are the hardest instruments to make convincing sample instruments out of and round robins and dynamic layers would have breathed so much more life into this. Again, i really like the tone of this and would love to see a more deeply sampled version down the road.
