Firstly, I should warn you I’m not a luthier myself – I don’t even dare open a wine bottle without medical assistance close by – but reserch suggests that by far the most popular glue to use to repair or build a ukulele amongst luthiers is
Titebond Original Wood Glue. I’m told you have to make sure that the glue is the original, red top kind.
Getting your ukulele in tune is absolutely vital. You would think it goes without saying, but it’s surprising how many people think it’s ok to play an out of tune ukulele. Luckily, it’s easy to find a free online ukulele tuner.
For a listen and compare tuner, this site has a tuner with a number of possible variations on the standard ukulele tuning.
If you’re looking for tuning notes for low-G ukulele, baritone ukulele or a number of other common variations you can find them on this page of ukulele tuning notes.
For a tuner that will tell you when you’re out of tune, you can download AP Tuner for free (although it will bug you to register at a hugely overpriced $35 – you could buy a real life tuner for around half that). To use it, you’ll need a mic to plug into your computer. The notes you want to tune to for gCEA are G4, C4, E4 and A4. Don’t feel you need to get the notes bang on – you’ll be there forever.
Tenor ukulele tabs and chords are, for the most part, exactly the same as soprano ukulele chords and tabs. Both are usually tuned GCEA with the G string being re-entrant (i.e. higher than the C string). That means you can take chords and tabs written for soprano or concert ukulele and play them on the tenor ukulele without any need to adapt them at all.
You might have noticed I used words like ‘for the most part’ and ‘usually’ rather a lot in the last paragraph. That’s because it’s not always that simple. It’s much more common for tenor ukuleles to have a G string which is lower than the C string (Low-G tuning). This means that soprano ukulele tabs will not necessarily work on the low-G ukulele. It will be possible to adapt it somewhat so it does work.
However, this does not apply to low-G tenor ukulele chords. What matters with the chords is the overall harmony rather than the specific notes. So chords for soprano ukulele should work on the tenor ukulele (even if it is tuned to low-G).
Photo by Paxsimius under CC Lincense.
