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The Flight MUS-2’s neck is solid mahogany, too, but made of three parts, with the neck heel and the upper half of the peg head glued to the neck’s long main part. This is a beautiful instrument that invokes its vintage mojo with the help of a matte open-pore finish over a rich brown wood stain.įlight’s own additions to the recipe include wooden body binding – instead of the celluloid plastic used on the original – as well as a cream rosette around the soundhole. gig bag) is their version of a Martin Style 2 soprano ukulele. The Flight MUS-2 (current price in Finland: 199 € incl. Nowadays friction tuners are mostly found on vintage-style ukuleles, like on the three instruments reviewed here.įlight is a Chinese brand concentrating mostly on ukuleles. You should also keep the right screwdriver handy for quick adjustments of the pegs’ stiffness, which can shift between summer and winter, due to the headstock wood expanding and contracting according to the relative humidity. Just keep in mind that very little goes a long way with patent pegs, when it comes to hitting the correct pitch. But there is no reason to be afraid of friction pegs, either, once you know the basics of tuning your instrument. I would never recommend giving a beginner an instrument with patent pegs, because learning to tune your uke properly is hard enough in the beginning. Their ”action” or stiffness can be adjusted with the screw at the top of the tuning button. Friction tuners contain no gears, meaning their ”gear” ratio is 1:1 (like on a wooden peg), but here the friction is caused by metal washers, or plastic washers, or metal springs, that are forced against the front and back surfaces of the headstock. In 1920 Martin started introducing new-fangled friction pegs – first on more expensive models, but then across their whole uke range – which offered a much smoother tuning action. This is exactly the same type of system that’s still in use on violins or cellos. Originally, all ukuleles came with simple wooden friction pegs that kept the strings in tune by simple friction between the hole in the headstock (aka peg head) and the wooden peg.

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This is normally somewhere between 14:1 and 18:1, meaning 14 or 18 turns of the knob shaft will give you one full turn of the tuner’s post. This is due to the so-called gear ratio, meaning the number of turns on a machine head’s knob relating to a full turn of the actual tuner post. Most ukuleles these days are made with geared guitar tuners, which make tuning relatively easy for beginners. My personal favourite is the dark brown all-mahogany Style 2, which is why I’ve chosen three all-solid Style 2-copies for this review. The higher the Style’s number the more intricate the cosmetic features, like bindings and rosettes, would be. The Martin Company originally introduced three soprano models in 1915, named Style 1, Style 2 and Style 3. Martin also sold bucketloads of the little instruments – their ”economy model” alone, the Martin Style 0, sold almost 90,000 units between 19, when the original production run ended (temporarily). Not content making mere copies of Hawaiian instruments Martin almost singlehandedly developed the ukulele further, raising the benchmark for how a great uke should look and sound in the process. Even though Martin is a company based in Pennsylvania, they have started crafting ukes during the ukulele boom of the 1910s already. Martin & Co is a legendary maker of ukuleles. If you’re interested in the history of this diminutive instrument you will have noticed that C.

Over time our playing will have improved, making us feel that it was maybe time to step up to a higher quality uke, which in most cases will mean an all-solid instrument. Most of us will have started learning to play the uke with an affordable instrument, whose soundbox is probably made – at least in part – from laminated wood. All EQ-settings were kept identical between the three models.Īlkuperäinen suomenkielinen juttu on ilmestynyt Rockway-blogissa. The ukes have been recorded with a Citronic RM-06 ribbon microphone plugged into a Cranborne Audion Camden EC2 preamp.