Jake shimabukuro what kind of uke

When did it go from being a typical recreational activity to taking over your life? Jake Shimabukuro: I was always very passionate about it. But when I was a kid there was no such thing as a touring solo ukulele player, so I always understood that it would be more of a hobby. Luckily it evolved into that. I feel very fortunate that I get to travel, perform and just play my ukulele everywhere. This is really a dream come true. FJ: I imagine a lot of kids take up the uke in Hawaii. Was there a point in your childhood where you sort of realized you taking the instrument more seriously than your peers?

JS: When I was in high school, I would pull electric guitar riffs and quote classical pieces and things like that. I started dabbling in different styles of music, playing some rock tunes, and jazz tunes, classical pieces… just hinting at different things in the beginning before really tackling them with a serious arrangement.

My freshman year in high school is when I really started to get experimental. I mean, that will always be my first love, but I really wanted to see what else was possible out there. I wanted to extend the boundaries of what ukulele music was. FJ: It seems as though every few years, a mainstream media outlet does a piece about the ukulele renaissance going on.

What advice would you give to all those folks who want to take up the uke for the first time? Do you steer them towards a particular instrument? You can play songs with three chords. So you start your little chord collection. JS: Yes, we do. It was a Kamaka standard ukulele and we still have it.

My mom had it when she was a teenager, so that was the instrument that I started out on. Kamaka ukuleles are still the brand that I play today. I love their instruments. JS: Yeah, I have, but Kamakas are always my go-to. I have about four or five instruments at home…. JS: Yeah. I still am today. I still have that same drive and curiosity towards the instrument. You can start playing right away. You can throw it in your backpack. I was wondering, do you make any efforts in music education, or was that just for fun?

When you play an instrument, you learn some pretty special things like commitment, dedication. You learn patience. JS: When you hear the ukulele or you hear someone play the ukulele, it just makes you smile. When you play the ukulele, you try to accumulate other ukulele-playing friends. Do you think the Internet has helped you and the instrument grow? JS: Definitely. I totally owe my touring career to YouTube … I think the Internet has been a huge source of inspiration for a lot of people.

You can go on YouTube and find videos of people playing the ukulele everywhere. You can learn it right away. Can you talk about your inspiration and creative process? JS: I just wanted to find a good balance for this record — a balance of original material and recognizable songs. I grew up listening to Jeff Beck and he does a lot of these close voicings where the two notes really fight each other. It makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

Of course, now that we are playing it live, I had to go back and learn what I played on the recording. How did you record the different sounds? The way we recorded this album was all new territory for me, so I was excited the whole time. The record is all live takes—each song is one live take from beginning to end.

We overdubbed after, so the drummer might go back and add some parts, but this was the first time I went back and layered different ukuleles. I used the tenor, the baritone, and the soprano, which was neat to hear because they all have such different characteristics, and used all of these effected sounds, like overdriven amps and a Leslie rotating-speaker cabinet.

I took a signal from my uke and split it into all of these different things in the studio. One signal went into the Leslie, another went into the plate-reverb room, a tape echo, an overdriven amp, a clean signal, and a few others, so every signal was being recorded at any given time.

While everything was being recorded together, I could step on a switch and choose which sound I wanted to hear in my headphones.

So, if I was playing with a clean sound and wanted to hear my overdrive sound for a solo, I could step on a switch and change the signal in my headphones to the sound from the overdriven amp in another room. So, we started playing this vamp over the A minor part and I spontaneously stepped on the overdrive channel and started soloing.

We were looking at each other, trying to figure out how to get out of this and eventually the bass player just stopped, then I stopped, and then the drummer stopped. It was fun. How did you end up using several different kinds of ukuleles on this record?

The idea of layering the tenor, soprano, and baritone ukuleles came from hanging out with [resonator guitar master] Jerry Douglas immediately prior to going into the studio.