Recently, I have read an interesting book which is called “Let’s Go to Hawaii”. It is written by OGURI Saori and Tony Laszlo who are married and deeply traveled Hawaii.Since Hawaii is the most famous place for Ukulele playing, I am looking forward to reading this book for some information about this instrument.
In this book, they visited a handmade Ukulele manufacture. Ukulele is also called “four-string banjo” or “four-string guitar”. A Portuguese introduce it into Hawaii. And the meaning of Ukulele is interesting, too. In Hawaiian, Uku means fleas, and Lele means hops. It means while playing Ukulele, the way of fingers moving looks like fleas hopping on the strings! Ha! Ha! I’ve never heard of this!
Another interesting thing is that the price of Ukulele depends on the grain of the wood. If the grain is wavy, the price is expensive. The owner of the manufacture said that the wood with wavy grain is very rare. You can only find one in thousands of woods. That is the reason why wavy grain Ukulele is so expensive. But the timbre is not different from the different grains!
Sounds interesting, right? Hope to share more interesting information with you all the time! See you soon! Take care!
Actually, before reading your posts, I didn’t know what Ukulele is because I only heard the name of it in the past. It seems that the prices of the instruments are often depend on the grain of the wood and whether they are handmade or not, like violin, flute and so on.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the information!