Categories

A sample text widget

Etiam pulvinar consectetur dolor sed malesuada. Ut convallis euismod dolor nec pretium. Nunc ut tristique massa.

Nam sodales mi vitae dolor ullamcorper et vulputate enim accumsan. Morbi orci magna, tincidunt vitae molestie nec, molestie at mi. Nulla nulla lorem, suscipit in posuere in, interdum non magna.

How I tuned my ukulele

I am back home after two months of traveling. I knew that I wouldn’t have much internet access during that time and I prepared myself: I packed a bunch of books and a ukulele.

I started learning the ukulele when my daughter got one as a gift. I practiced with her instrument for the last few months before we went off, but I didn’t want to take it along on the journey. Since we started in Cebu, a place famous for ukuleles, I planned to buy a cheap one there and take it along for the rest of the journey. Thus I could be sure that I wouldn’t break my dauthers “toy” and gain a “backup” when we are back home 🙂
So far so good. What I didn’t think about was one thing:

  • A traveling ukulele needs to be tuned a lot.
  • A new ukulele needs to be tuned a lot.
  • A cheap ukulele needs to be tuned a lot.

I know, that are three things, but these three weren’t the thing I didn’t think about. I kind of expected that I had to tune the uke each time I pick it up. What I forgot was that I will be without internet connectivity most of the time.
Back home, I usually used the reference tunes on Ukulele.nl. When I found myself without that source, I was looking for some audio files with the four reference tunes, but without success.

Luckily, I was traveling with a laptop running Free Software, so a much quicker research than the one for audio files led me to the following commands:

Update (2016-05-22): The command “play” is part of the “sox” package which is not part of recent distributions anymore but can be installed afterwards without affecting ALSA or pulseaudio. If you know a way how to do the same with aplay, please let me know!

# Soprano C ukulele:
play -n synth 4 pluck 391.995 # G
play -n synth 4 pluck 261.626 # C
play -n synth 4 pluck 329.628 # E
play -n synth 4 pluck 440       # A

Wikipedia was kind enough to tell me the frequencies 🙂

In case you are not aware what’s possible with this highly underestimated instrument, here are a few starters to put you in ‘awe mode’: