MG Sweet Uke

A few years back I went birthday shopping in London’s Denmark Street for a nice high-end ukulele, and was immediately sold on this beautiful Kala ASOV-S model. With its solid spruce top and ovangkol wood back and sides, the instrument produces a sweet, warm and rich sound, especially when the strings are individually plucked; an average ukulele, whilst great for strumming chords tends to produce very inconsistent results from note to note, with buzzes and intonation issues.

MG Sweet Uke captures the beauty of this ukulele in a fingerpicking style, using a single condenser microphone – my trusty Neumann TLM-193. The main notes consist of 3x round robins with 3 velocity layers. There are slurs (2x round robins, both hammer-ons and pull-offs) which are played when a previous note is held and overlapped. There is also some realism-enhancing scripting under the hood.

I am delighted to offer this instrument to the Pianobook community. Being a proud Pianobook Artist I am also planning to release a commercial version soon, with more detailed scripting, and in-depth features such as multiple mics and chord / strumming options.

NOTE: I extended the instrument note range of the ukulele down an octave, stretching the lowest (C3) note downwards, as I thought it sounded more than good enough!