Monday 25 April 2016

Making Double Back Ukulele

Currently this is only an idea for a ukulele construction. I do not mean the back wood is laminated but rather two parallel curved back plates are separated, say, at a 0.5-10mm distance. I wonder if this makes sense at all or that would result in a significant improvement to the tone/projection of a ukulele. Perhaps someone has experimented it with ukulele before. The argument is this: The sound of the instrument when played is slightly dampened when the instrument is touching the player's body. The double layer would have one layer touching the player's body while the inner back layer is free to vibrate and bounce energy (air pressure) forward to the ukulele top.


Weighing the proposition

The sound of an acoustic instrument, be that the tone, projection or sustain depends on many many factors. I asked myself if the benefit of producing louder sound, if any using double back construction, outweighs the additional materials and works needed and hence results in a slightly heavier product. The contemplation of building one has been on my mind for sometimes now. If people out there have done this before please share your thoughts with us here. For comparison, we need to build two similar ukuleles using a similar wood combination, except one with double back. Even two similar ukuleles could produce two different sounds. But I shall be looking at projection among others.

By the way, as I did a bit or searching, the idea of double back has been done long time ago on classical guitars. Allow me to point to this article  http://www.granadaexpert.com/johnray/the-double-back/ and this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf0cB3eVna8




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