The ukulele: history and parts

In late August 1879 the ship Ravenscrag reached Honolulu from Madeira; among its passengers were the cabinet makers now credited with building the first ukuleles.

From Madeira to Hawaiʻi

The ukulele grew out of small guitar-like instruments from Portugal, above all the machete of Madeira, along with the cavaquinho and the rajão. In the late 1800s many Portuguese families moved to the Hawaiian Islands to work, and they brought these instruments with them. Three Madeiran cabinet makers who arrived on the SS Ravenscrag in late August 1879, Manuel Nunes, José do Espírito Santo and Augusto Dias, are generally credited as the first ukulele makers. Two weeks after the ship came in, the newspaper Hawaiian Gazette reported that the new Madeira Islanders were entertaining people with street concerts every night.

The instrument found a powerful supporter in King Kalākaua, who reigned in the 1870s and 1880s and promoted Hawaiian music and dance. He had the ukulele played at royal gatherings, which helped make it part of Hawaiian culture rather than an imported curiosity. The name is usually translated as "jumping flea", perhaps for the way a player’s fingers hop over the strings. One story ties it to Edward William Purvis, an English officer at Kalākaua’s court who was small, restless and a skilled player, but like many naming stories it is a legend rather than a record.

Parts of the ukulele

The parts are the same as a guitar’s, only smaller and fewer. The four strings run from the bridge on the body, over the sound hole, along the neck and over the nut to the tuning pegs on the headstock. The vibrating length of a string, from the nut to the saddle on the bridge, is called the scale length. Thin metal strips called frets are set into the fretboard. Pressing a string just behind a fret shortens its vibrating length and raises the pitch by one semitone per fret. The frets get closer together as you move toward the body, because each one shortens the remaining length by the same ratio rather than by the same distance.

Four sizes

The soprano is the original size and is still called the standard ukulele in Hawaiʻi. The concert size came in the 1920s as a slightly larger, louder soprano, and the tenor followed with more volume and a deeper low end. The baritone, from the 1940s, is tuned like the top four strings of a guitar, so its chord shapes have different names. Soprano, concert and tenor all use the same tuning and the same chord shapes, so everything in this course works on any of them. On a soprano with a 33 cm scale, the 12th fret sits exactly halfway, 16.5 cm from the nut, and the first fret is only about 18.5 mm from the nut.