Baton Rouge V2-G Sun guitalele

This is the first guitalele review on ukulele.hu, so I am not even sure where to begin. Perhaps an honest confession belongs at the start: I cannot really play guitar. I can fret and play a few things on one, but for now I still prefer four-stringed instruments such as ukulele and bass guitar. I was extremely curious, however, about what a little guitar like this could do – hehe – so I definitely wanted to try one.

The first obvious difference between a ukulele and a guitalele is naturally the size, especially if you are used to soprano ukuleles. A guitalele is roughly the size of a baritone ukulele, and its neck is much wider because it has to accommodate six strings.

Compared with four strings, six can suddenly seem bewilderingly many to somebody who has spent their entire musical life holding only a ukulele. Guitar players, on the other hand, can start playing a guitalele almost immediately because the intervals between the strings are the same as on a guitar, so the chord shapes are fingered in exactly the same way. Apart from physical size, the difference between a guitar and a guitalele is that the guitalele is tuned ADGCEA, while standard guitar tuning is EADGBE. In other words, the chords played on a guitalele are like guitar chords shifted up by a perfect fourth – equivalent to playing a guitar with a capo at the fifth fret. Ukulele players may also find the guitalele very familiar because its four highest strings have exactly the same tuning as a low-G ukulele: GCEA. It simply adds two lower strings, D and A.

If somebody is looking for new challenges instead of the ukulele and wants something new to explore, adding a guitalele to the collection is worth considering. It gives us a compact little guitar on which we can even begin our preliminary guitar studies. On the four highest strings we can use familiar ukulele chord shapes, then learn to add the extra chord tones on the two lower strings.

So there are plenty of new chord shapes to learn, but in return the chords purr with a fuller sound thanks to those two extra bass strings. Let us see and hear the Baton Rouge V2-G Sun guitalele and how I got on with it.