Post #65137 by Hot Lava on Tue, Dec 16, 2003 5:57 AM

If you live a million miles away from anyone who sells ukes, I good place for info and advice is Jim Beloff's Flea Market Music website. Jim is the author of "The Book of Ukelele" and has several good instructional books and videos, plus songbooks.

The message boards there are full of advice on good ukes at different price ranges, and based on the advice there I ended up picking up a "Flea" uke made by the Fluke company from [url="http://www.elderly.com/highlights/ukulele.html"Elderly Instruments[\url] as an inexpensive ($120) backup for my $400 Kamaka uke (I'm nervous about dragging it around). It sounds almost as good as the expensive one but I don't care as much if I drop it or my 2-year old gets a hold of it.

Which one to get, of course, depends entirely on how much you want to pay. Real koa wood ukes are beautiful, but costly.

And remember, it's pronounced "oo-koo-lay-lay," not "you-ka-lale-lee." :)