An Unexpected Ukulele
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I met my friend Bill Hatfield, when he owned a local guitar / ukulele sales and repair shop. He happened to be a Larrivee dealer which is how how found his shop in the first place. Bill has been amassing an arsenal of luthier tools for a few decades now and he started building his first acoustic guitars about 18 months ago.
He never intended to sell guitars, just make them for family and close friends for time and material type fees. IOW, very good pricing on hand crafted instruments done to world-class standards.
His first two guitars are very very nice. Well the first one is the only one I have played but the second guitar just looks so much better still. As is usual when one gets more experience.
He interrupted the build on the 2nd guitar to build his first Ukulele. He decided to do this to offer it for sale with all of the proceeds going to his daughter's family as her husband is fighting cancer and cannot work.
It was offered up at a family event but did not sell so Bill put it up on FB yesterday with a video of him playing it and singing a Beatles song.
Sarah watched the video with me and at the end of the video I blurted out, I want to buy it. And to my surprise, she agreed!
So I sent a dm to Bill telling him that I want the Ukulele. He was very happy that I ended up with it.
It sounds amazing. It has a very long sustain if you want it.
All solid wood all hand made. American Walnut Back, Sides and Top. Flame Maple Body Binding and Fretboard that is bound in Walnut on top of Honduran Mahogany neck with scarf joint. Rosewood Bridge, Bone Saddle and Nut, Abalone/MOP fretboard markers and headstock logo. Bill had to make the body mold and all the other tooling required to thin plane and bend the sides, etc. Even the neck is hand carved. All the bracing is also hand carved. The beer stein on the heal plate is a nice touch.
Here are some photos of this little one-of-a-kind beauty.
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Looks like he does very nice work. He just needs to build more and get his name out there.
You never know what can happen.
About twenty years ago down in Baton Rouge, Jack Marucci (an athletic trainer at LSU) made a baseball bat for his son, because he couldn't find a commercial bat he liked. A couple of Louisiana guys who made the bigs and had used his bats (he'd made a few up for the Tiger players to fool around with), decided to go in business with Marucci and they opened up a hole-in-the-wall shop too small to cuss a cat in, down by Lumber Liquidators in a somewhat industrial part of town.
Mostly by LSU alumni using the bats, by word-of-mouth and by personal contacts, you started seeing the black Marucci bats in more and more major league games. Eventually, more than a third of all major league baseball players use Marucci bats.
Marucci Sports was sold by its founders in 2020 for $200,000,000.
So, you never know what can happen...Look at Taylor, Breedlove and Larivee...
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Looks like he does very nice work. He just needs to build more and get his name out there.
You never know what can happen.
About twenty years ago down in Baton Rouge, Jack Marucci (an athletic trainer at LSU) made a baseball bat for his son, because he couldn't find a commercial bat he liked. A couple of Louisiana guys who made the bigs and had used his bats (he'd made a few up for the Tiger players to fool around with), decided to go in business with Marucci and they opened up a hole-in-the-wall shop too small to cuss a cat in, down by Lumber Liquidators in a somewhat industrial part of town.
Mostly by LSU alumni using the bats, by word-of-mouth and by personal contacts, you started seeing the black Marucci bats in more and more major league games. Eventually, more than a third of all major league baseball players use Marucci bats.
Marucci Sports was sold by its founders in 2020 for $200,000,000.
So, you never know what can happen...Look at Taylor, Breedlove and Larivee...
@Jolly Cool story. Bill is in retirement and is doing this as more of a hobby. We talked about him possibly taking commissions for custom guitars and he is more likely to do something like that. But, he started out only wanting to build enough guitars for himself so he can sell his high end branded guitars. He wants to build Ukuleles for his grand kids. I suspect the first guitar he sells won't be available any time soon. He does have a pretty sizable investment in tools and I think his wife wants him to sell more guitars and ukuleles. lol
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Still working on this but I decided to do a progress video of my Waltzing Matilda partial arrangement. This is the first piece I ever learned for real on a ukulele. In the past I would just tinker with them, learning snippets here and there.
I'm working on an arrangement of a two part version for guitar and ukulele.
Link to video -
Still working on this but I decided to do a progress video of my Waltzing Matilda partial arrangement. This is the first piece I ever learned for real on a ukulele. In the past I would just tinker with them, learning snippets here and there.
I'm working on an arrangement of a two part version for guitar and ukulele.
Link to video@mark said in An Unexpected Ukulele:
Waltzing Matilda
I love that song.
Very nice, @mark . I don't know what you plan to do with tempo, but the slower pace lends a bit of poignancy that's really nice.
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@mark said in An Unexpected Ukulele:
Waltzing Matilda
I love that song.
Very nice, @mark . I don't know what you plan to do with tempo, but the slower pace lends a bit of poignancy that's really nice.
@George-K Thank you! I have heard the tempo all over the place with this one. Also some arrangements that make it completely different sounding. I did not study this piece from a multi-score perspective. I found one that looked like I could manage and went for it. I am still missing a bit even from this score. Two chords in particular are proving to be rather difficult to finger in time. It will just take a lot more practice. Plus I am learning the guitar part but it is in a completely different key so, I need to transpose or use a capo. lol
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Very cool, mark.
