Product Design + Branding: Manulele

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For some, the ukulele is not the instrument they wish to play but rather the one they're stuck with.

Role: Product Designer
User Research, Interaction, Visual design, Prototyping, Testing
2021–ongoing

Background

As a musician and music teacher over a period of 20 years, I had observed a theme that piqued my interest: a lot of ukulele players I met wished they could play guitar, but struggled (and mostly gave up) when making that transition. Because I'm always curious, wanted to help the folks I was encountering, AND because yearly ukulele sales in the united states can be as much as $140,000,000, it seemed like a problem worth solving

The problem(s)

My informal understanding of the problem went as follows:

1) A would-be musician is inspired by music played on guitar.

2) whether a parent was responding to a child, or an adult was getting themselves an instrument, the ukulele presents itself as the best option.

This is because of the perception that it is easy to play physically due to its size, and easy to learn conceptually because of 4 strings on the ukulele vs 6 strings on a guitar. Sometimes this is instilled in them by a salesperson at a music store, but in any case they come to see the guitar as complex and hard.

Eventually a non-zero number of these new musicians feel the need to finally move to guitar, the instrument that originally inspired them, and they find it . . . complex and hard. The instrument is much bigger, and more than just having 6 strings, the strings it has are tuned completely differently than the instrument they've learned. It feels as though almost none of the skills one develops on ukulele are transferable.

A glaring example of this is the C chord. On the ukulele it's gloriously simple, and on the guitar it's just . . . very different. When most people learn an instrument they don't learn music theory, they learn songs. This makes understanding the 'why' of how different these two C chords are kind of messy even if one wanted to.

The research

I conducted interviews and a survey (logic map above) to try to learn people's histories with ukuleles and guitars. Some things I wanted to know:

• Did they start playing as kids?

• Whichever instrument they chose—or was chosen for them—did they ever switch? Did they succeed in learning the new instrument?

• Did they feel their experience on the first instrument helped them with learning the second?

• Specifically for those moving from ukulele to guitar, why did they want to make the switch?

• If they didn't succeed, what specifically didn't work for them / was confusing or difficult?

User goals and how to help them get there

From the data it was clear that the first issue some ukulele players had, i.e., why they wanted to pick up a guitar in the first place, was a sound in their head that they wished they could get. For some it was the sound of a campfire, for others their favorite John Mayer song, however the reference for them they'd eventually come around to words I could interpret as the sound of low-tuned strings.

Every note on a conventionally tuned ukulele resides on the highest pitched two strings of a guitar. On an acoustic guitar these strings are also the quietest strings, which means that easily more than 60% of the sound of a guitar that they were wishing for is unattainable on the ukulele. There are ukuleles with a "low G", which occupies the range of the 3rd highest string on a guitar, so a little better, but not great. Then there are "baritone" ukuleles. These are tuned exactly the same as the highest 4 strings on a guitar, so getting closer, but the drawback here is that they match the pitches of guitar tuning, not ukulele tuning. Ditto for "guitaleles", which are essentially just small guitars, but still higher pitch than a guitar, and not capable attaining the second wish I heard from my research.

The dream for my would-be users was the ability pick up a guitar and be able to play chords their fingers already know on the lowest strings of the guitar to get that campfire vibe.

Getting low

I started experimenting with tunings to use on a standard guitar and arrived at two versions that showed promise. One mirrored exactly the tuning of a ukulele on the lowest strings of the guitar. This had the low range of a baritone ukulele with the advantage that one is able to play chords exactly as they would be played on the ukulele including the tight harmonies of 'reentrant tuning' (the 4th string on a standard ukulele is higher in pitch than the 3rd. In my experimental tuning the 6th was similarly higher pitch than the 5th). The other tuning mirrored that of "low G" ukulele tuning which still allowed for playing standard ukulele chords, but with a range only 3 semitones higher than the range of standard guitar tuning. The highest 2 strings in both version extend the range of the instrument and add to the available ways of playing chords for anybody who has the theory knowledge to explore.

Validation

When I had a working test instrument, that is: a small size guitar I got from eBay strung in my experimental tuning, I sent it to various people who had participated in my interviews and professional ukulele players who I had met in the meantime at a musical instrument conference. The pros with experience on ukulele and guitar gave me the feedback that it was great for strumming and It allowed for a new sense of creative freedom in the additional strings. The players, wether pro or beginner gave me the feedback that it’s an easier transition because they could still use the ukulele chords they knows, but these chords make a guitar-like sound.

Next I showed it to guitar players without ukulele experience, or with very little ukulele experience. They expressed confusion as to how to play it, and why anybody would want this, even after I'd explained it to them in detail. I took this, in combination with the positive feedback from my target audience, as a sign that I had something for an untapped market and should pursue turning it into a product.

A name and a logo

In Hawaiian, ukulele means "jumping flea" (uku=flea, lele=to jump or fly). Supposedly the instrument received this name in part because of it's high pitched sound. Being that this new conceptual instrument was tuned an octave lower, and is bigger in size I considered options for a different animal that could be jumping or flying and landed on a manu, or bird. Here on Maui and some of the other islands of Hawai'i there is a type of honey creeper known as an I'iwi, which has a distinctive red color and long curved beak. They are endemic to the islands and historically are significant in ceremonial use of their bright feathers. On the islands, the silhouette is instantly recognizable. The design is a work in progress, but at the moment includes a subtle pink to add to the tropical flavor.