Ukulele · Chapter 1 of 24

Meet the Ukulele

Four nylon strings on a small wooden body. Here are its parts, its sizes, and the four notes you’ll tune it to.

A ukulele is a small guitar-shaped instrument with four strings. You press the strings with one hand and strum or pluck them with the other. It’s light, quiet enough for an apartment, and a few chords are enough to play real songs.

The parts

The neck end

Headstock: the top, with the tuning pegs that tighten or loosen each string.

Nut: the small grooved strip where the strings leave the headstock.

Neck and fretboard: the long part you hold, with metal frets across it. Dots on the fretboard mark frets 5, 7 and 10 on most ukuleles, and often 12 as well.

The body

Body: the hollow wooden box that makes the sound bigger.

Sound hole: the round opening in the top.

Bridge and saddle: where the strings are tied to the body. The saddle is the thin strip the strings rest on.

When you press a string down just behind a fret, the part of the string that vibrates gets shorter and the note goes up. Each fret raises the note by a half step, the smallest step in Western music, the same as moving one key to the right on a piano.

Four sizes

Size	Scale length (nut to saddle)	Usual tuning
Soprano	about 13 inches	G C E A
Concert	about 15 inches	G C E A
Tenor	about 17 inches	G C E A
Baritone	about 19 inches	D G B E

The soprano is the original size. The concert and tenor are a little bigger and a little fuller in sound, with more room between the frets. All three are tuned alike, so everything in this course works on any of them. The baritone is tuned like the top four strings of a guitar, so its chord shapes have different names; if you have one, the chord finder shows baritone shapes.

The four strings

Hold the ukulele as you would to play it and count the strings from the floor up: the one nearest the floor is string 1, and the one nearest your chin is string 4. From string 4 to string 1 they are tuned G, C, E, A.

Press each one and listen. Something is odd: the G (string 4) is not the lowest note. It’s higher than the C and the E. This is called re-entrant tuning, and it’s why a ukulele sounds bright and close, with its notes bunched together. The lowest note on a standard ukulele is the C, string 3.

This fretboard is drawn with string 1 (A) at the top, the way you see the neck if you look down at it while playing. Press any spot to hear it.

Remember G C E A with the old saying “My Dog Has Fleas”: sing it to the four open strings and it fits, string 4 to string 1.

Try it. If you have a ukulele, find each part on it. Then pluck the four open strings from 4 to 1 and listen for the high G.

Remember

Strings are numbered from the floor up: string 1 is A, string 4 is G.
The open strings are G C E A; the G is tuned high.
Each fret raises a note by a half step.