Author Archives: julesd

Scully’s iphone/ipad futulele canjolele ukulele

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My mate scully is quite the genius when it comes to electronics and biscuit tins. Here is a video we just made of his brand new canjolelel / electrolele / futulele / iUkelele / tabulele / phoneulele / ukulele hero machine.

It is made with a Cadbury’s biscuit tin, a plank of wood, an iPad 3, an iPhone 4, and a bit of masking tape. Oh… and a funky bit of software called futulele which runs on both the ipad and iphone and connects them together to act like the neck and the body of the uke.

It is possible that this is the silliest future ukulele ever built! Hooray… watch out for when he has learnt a song or two more, only on ukeland.co.uk

Jakata Street Punks (video)

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A group of friendly street punks in Indonesia’s capitol, Jakarta.

We had heard the punk ukulele scene in Jakarta was big. We bumped into these punk kids the first time we went out for a walk around and they were happy to let us record them playing uke. In the few days we were there, we meet more new ukulele friends than you ever could have expected. It seems a uke to these kids is like a PSP or a blackberry is to kids in the UK. It gives them amusement, entertainment and above all, a voice to tell everyone else about how they see the world.

Google Glasses (or 15 frames of fame)

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Back in the day, when electric ukulele land was just a little acoustic, they used to talk about ’15 minutes of fame’. These days, it is more like 15 frames, but… we will take it. 15 frames is better than nothing.

So … this video is a mild parody of what it would be like if google put adverts in ‘google glass’. You will note that ‘Electric ukulele land’ turns up in the google+ search around about the 0:36 mark in this video.

You may also note that 521,062 (at the time of writing) people have watched this video!!

(thanks rebelliouspixels)

Better than unboxing the IPAD 3… the Draper 1200W

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Some people buy iPad3’s and unbox them in video’s on you tube so that other brand fanboys can feel what it is like to open new tech without having to shell out hundreds of pounds. We here at ukeland have all been lusting after power tools for building electric ukes. Resident tool teaser ‘King Uke’ and co have made us a router unboxing video. We love it. WANT ONE!

RIP John T

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It is with great regret that we bring you news of the passing of John Thompson. His son James announced that he passed away after having a massive stroke at the age of 52.

John T was one of the UK’s leading lights in the recent Ukulele revival. You might have seen his shop photos on a previous post on this sight. In the few times we met him we found him to be kind and generous with his knowledge, totally enthusiastic about ukulele’s and a great guy to talk to. We will miss you John. Our thoughts are with your family at this difficult time.

(photo courtesy of http://www.ukuke.co.uk/gallery.htm )

“Jakarta Punk – The Marjinal Story”

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I got an email in from my friend Ayumi just recently with news on the documentary they are working on. She tells me how she has got together with her film partner Maria to work on a film about the street punks in Jakarta and their ukulele antics. They have launched their promo on a site for creative projects called kickstarter to try and raise funding for their 5-year-long documentary into a film “Jakarta Punk – The Marjinal Story.”

In the promo, they show a lot of photos of kids playing ukulele, and they describe the work that Marjinal do and the activities the get involved in to help others understand more about them.

You can visit the fundraising site here :- “Jakarta Punk – The Marjinal Story”

What is U-bass?

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The term U-Bass is a relatively new one, owned by Kala. It is there trade name for their 4-string full range bass ukelele. It has a half-scale neck that measures 21″ that uses special polyurethane strings reproduce the sounds of a full size upright bass. The ‘u’ part of the name stems from the fact that it is built around either a solid or an acoustic baritone ukelele body. It can be bought either as a 16 frets (with the neck meeting the body at the 12th fret), fretted or fretless model.

On Sunday evening I was lucky enough to meet Paris from The Pukes and she let me have a look at her solid body u-bass. We suspect that it might be the only solid body u-bass in the U.K. at the moment, but if you know of any others, we would love to hear from you. Please leave a comment below.

Paris reckons it plays really well and the short chance I got to play, it felt nice in my hands. The strings didn’t feel at all sticky, (see the Ashbory below for more on that) but I didn’t get a chance to plug it in.

Paris was also kind enough to flip the u-bass over and let us take a little look inside the preamp cavity. You can see in here a small CR-2032 battery, the same kind that is inside the pre-amp of my Kala Tenor uke. In the years I have owned that uke, I have only ever had to change the battery once or twice and they are available all over the place now. Our local 99p shop sells 5 for a pound 😉

So Paris has the only solid body we know of, but we did see this acoustic version down at John T’s Shopand we were very impressed with that. It is smaller than a guitar, but has a warm acoustic sound like a upright bass.

I had played a Ashbory DeArmnd short scale bass a few years ago. Like the u-bass, this half scale unit was a light weight, poly-stringed bass and I guess in many ways it inspired the newer u-bass. When I played this, the strings were a little sticky, but it was perfectly playable. The company Ashbory is now owned by Fender.

It also has a little pre-ap built into it’s cavity which you can find pictures of below.

You can download the schematic for the Ashbory’s preamp from largesound. I think this could be a very useful schematic for any nylon string uke pre-amp you might be building.