Category: Musical Instruments

Mostly about ukuleles and my passion for playing and collecting them, but also about other instruments such as bass guitar, tenor guitar and harmonica.

Selling the electric upright bass

Arts / Musical Instruments / Personal ReminiscencesOne Comment

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My first experience playing a bass guitar came when I was asked to join a local garage band in the mid-1960s. I was learning rhythm guitar back then, inspired by the Beatles and the wave of British pop bands that flooded the airwaves from around 1962. But they already had two of those. They didn’t have a bass player, though, so I became the bass player. Not a terribly good one, mind you, but it was a fun experience. As soon as I left, a year or two later, I went back to rhythm guitar. But bass stuck with me ……… click below for more ↓

In Appreciation of Vintage Music

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I was listening the other day to a song sung by Cliff Edwards, Cheating on Me, recorded from an old 78 RPM single. Scratchy, warbly, and a bit thin, but it comes across beautifully across the gap of time. When you listen for a while, the scratches just disappear into the background and you hear Ukulele Ike’s lovely voice cut through the noise. I was thinking it was a song I really should learn to play myself. Listen to Edwards’s classic strumming in his version, as well as the key change towards the end: I have it on my MP3, ……… click below for more ↓

A Little Uke on the Side

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About 20 kilometres from home, while mentally playing the piece I had practiced all week, I asked myself if I had remembered to pack my tuner. I remembered taking it off the ukulele and placing it in my luggage. I had raced upstairs to put it away and grab a gig bag for the Boat Paddle uke, resting on its stand downstairs. Whew. Of course the tuner was safely stored in the luggage. And the uke was… my mental alarm sounded. Still sitting in its stand. Back home. I had been distracted, gathering my books for the trip, forgot about ……… click below for more ↓

Is it time for a Collingwood ukulele group?

Arts / Collingwood / Culture / Musical Instruments / Personal Reminiscences2 Comments

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When a friend recently told me he had joined the new Guelph ukulele group, it made me somewhat envious. After all, having a local support-performance-practice-chat-socialize group for any hobby is always great. When your hobby is a passion that requires an audience to realize itself fully, a local group is de rigeur. You simply need others people to practice with to get better and share the joy. Uke groups have been springing up all over. The ukulele is currently the most popular musical instrument in the world. The Corktown Ukulele Jam is a weekly group get-together in Toronto that I’ve ……… click below for more ↓

The rise of the tenor guitar

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Tenor guitars have been around since the 1930s, possibly a few years earlier*, but they’ve never had a big following compared with six-string guitars. That seems to be changing, and I suspect it’s in part due to the incredible popularity of that other four-string guitar derivative: the ukulele. In the past six-twelve months, I’ve been seeing more tenor guitars on the Net, including several new custom tenor guitars made by talented luthiers. New sites about tenor guitars have sprung up, too. Both new and vintage tenors are showing up on eBay in what seems to be increasing numbers. There’s even ……… click below for more ↓

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