As you many have gathered from my prior post, I play the ukulele.1 There are two reasons I thought it important to bring with me on my trip to London. First, it’s the smallest instrument I know2 that can play chords and harmony, which is nice when I want to sing along with a backing.
The other reason is that I have minimal difficulty playing melodies on it. Whether I’m plucking out an old familiar melody to decide how to accompany it, playing along to my singing new melodies, or picking out new melodies, I can do them all with relative ease. Part of this is that the instrument is tuned to four of five pentatonic notes3 as its four strings. This also means when I want to play something with the dominant as the low note, it’s fairly easy to do, as the pentatonic scale a fourth below C still uses 4 of the 5 notes. The only difference is F instead of E.
All in all, the ukulele is a fun and easy instrument. I would highly recommend anyone to learn it.