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The G-C-E-A tuning and the reentrant G string

The standard ukulele, whether soprano, concert or tenor, is tuned across four strings: G, C, E, A, numbered 4 to 1 just like on a guitar. The highest string, the 1st, rings out A, exactly the reference A at 440 Hz an orchestra tunes to; the 3rd string rings out C, the same middle C found at the centre of a piano keyboard. These two landmarks are enough to place the ukulele against a piano if you want to check your tuning by ear.

But unlike a guitar, where the strings run from lowest to highest in numerical order, the G string (the 4th) is usually tuned high, above the neighbouring C string: this is called a reentrant tuning, or high-G. By ear, the real order of the strings from low to high is C, E, G, A, not G, C, E, A as the numbering would suggest. This is what gives the ukulele its bright, chiming tone, quite different from a guitar simply shrunk down.

To remember the order of the open strings, English-speaking ukulele teachers have long used a mnemonic phrase, My Dog Has Fleas: each word matches a string, G-C-E-A, sung low to high exactly as you strum it left to right on the instrument. Low-G string sets also exist, which turn the tuning linear like a guitar's and give the instrument a deeper register, but the reentrant high-G remains by far the standard on most ukuleles sold, and it is the one this guide uses throughout.

This apparent quirk is not just an inherited historical accident: it opens up a musical possibility unique to the ukulele, a technique called campanella, literally "little bell" in Italian. The idea is to play a melody by switching strings on every note rather than sliding along a single string, taking advantage of the fact that two neighbouring strings, under reentrant tuning, are sometimes only a tone apart. Each note keeps ringing for a moment after the next one starts, like the plucked strings of a harp, an overlapping resonance that is hard to achieve the same way on a guitar with its strictly linear tuning.

A history born in Madeira: from the Portuguese machete to the Hawaiian ukulele

The ukulele is not an instrument invented from scratch in Hawaii: it descends from a small Portuguese string instrument, the machete, also called braguinha or machete de Braga, after the city in northern Portugal where it is still found today. This four-string instrument belongs to the cavaquinho family, a Portuguese cousin of the mandolin and the lute, itself descended from plucked string instruments brought from Europe and the Middle East. A second Portuguese instrument, the five-string rajão, is also thought to have influenced the shape and tuning of the very first ukulele, born from a blend of the two.

The instrument reaches Hawaii in 1879, carried by Portuguese immigration, much of it from the Madeira archipelago, who came to work in the sugar cane fields. Three immigrants from Madeira, who arrived that year on the ship Ravenscrag, are considered the first luthiers to have built and popularised the ukulele on the island: Manuel Nunes, Augusto Dias and José do Espírito Santo. Local Hawaiian musicians, who already played waltzes and mazurkas on the Spanish guitar, quickly adopted this small, easy-to-carry instrument and adapted it to the island's musical taste.

The name "ukulele" comes from Hawaiian and literally means "leaping flea": uku for flea, lele for jump or fly, an image said to describe the rapid movement of the fingers on the strings while playing. Another explanation, attributed to Queen Lili'uokalani herself, holds that the word instead comes from uku meaning gift or reward and lele meaning to arrive: "the gift that came here." Both stories still coexist today, without either one really ruling out the other, each telling in its own way the meeting of two cultures that gave birth to the instrument.

From Kalākaua's royal court to the world stage

The ukulele might have stayed just another community instrument had the Hawaiian royal family not taken it up. King Kalākaua, nicknamed the "Merrie Monarch," along with his brother Prince Leleiohoku, his sister Princess Likelike and the future Queen Lili'uokalani, all musicians and composers, took up the ukulele and worked it into royal ceremonies. Kalākaua also encouraged teaching the instrument in Hawaiian schools, which secured its transmission to later generations rather than leaving it a passing fad among the newly arrived Portuguese immigrants.

The ukulele truly leaves Hawaii in 1915, at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. A Hawaiian pavilion features a ukulele quintet that becomes the fair's most talked-about attraction; of the 18.8 million visitors, a good many discover the instrument on that occasion. The craze sweeps the whole country by the fall of 1915, and the very next year, Tin Pan Alley songwriters, the New York district that then concentrated America's popular song industry, publish dozens of Hawaiian-flavoured titles to ride the wave.

The 1920s, in the middle of the Jazz Age, mark the American golden age of the ukulele: the instrument settles into vaudeville revues and mainstream recordings, carried by its lightness and how much easier it is to learn than the guitar or the banjo, to the point of becoming one of the favourite instruments for amateurs teaching themselves at home thanks to the many printed methods of the era. Since the 1990s, the ukulele has enjoyed a fresh surge of worldwide interest, driven by a handful of recordings that became iconic and by online video, which has made it one of the most filmed and shared instruments among beginners of every age.

Why you cannot copy your guitar chords

This is the number one trap for a guitarist who picks up a ukulele for the first time: old habits kick in, and they simply do not work. The reason lies entirely in the tuning. A guitar has six strings tuned E-A-D-G-B-E, a ukulele only four, tuned G-C-E-A with the added reentrant quirk described above. The intervals between the strings are not the same, so the geometry of a chord under your fingers changes completely, even when the chord shares its name.

The most telling detail hides in the order of the strings itself. On a guitar, each string is lower than the one before it: the ear descends steadily from the high E string down to the low E string, with one exception between G and B. On a ukulele with reentrant tuning, that is not even true any more: starting from the G string, you first go down to C, then back up to E and up again to A. The order of the strings, from low to high, is therefore not just a simple shift compared with the guitar, it is not even linear. This break is exactly why no simple transposition rule lets you convert a guitar chord into a ukulele chord: every shape has to be relearned from scratch.

In concrete terms, a C major on guitar uses five strings and several fingers; on ukulele, it is a single finger on the highest string. An A minor on guitar uses three fingers across several strings; on ukulele, one finger is also enough, but not in the same spot or on the same string. Keep this rule in mind: the chord name stays universal, it always names the same notes in theory, but the shape under your fingers belongs entirely to the instrument you are playing.

Reading a chord diagram and the basic shapes on the 4 strings

A ukulele chord is read from a small diagram with four vertical columns, one per string, in the order G, C, E, A from left to right exactly as they sit on the neck facing you. An empty circle above a column means the string rings open, with no finger on it; a solid dot placed on a fret shows where to put a finger, and the number inside the dot tells you which one: 1 for index, 2 for middle, 3 for ring, 4 for pinky.

With only four strings, a ukulele chord almost always comes down to one, two or three fingers, rarely more, which is why the instrument lets you play a clean chord within your very first minutes. The table below details the five most useful shapes to start with, string by string.

This table reads just like the diagram described above: "open" means no finger touches that string, and "fret" tells you which fret to press. Notice that C major and A minor, the two simplest chords, each use only a single pressed string: that economy of movement is exactly what makes them the classic starting point for any learner, on ukulele as on any string instrument.

The easiest chords to start with

C major is the very first chord to learn on ukulele: a single finger, the ring finger, on the A string at the 3rd fret is enough to make it ring true. A minor comes right after, also with a single finger, the middle finger this time, on the G string at the 2nd fret. Switching between C and A minor is often the first thing a beginner manages to play, sometimes in the very first session.

Unlike more comfortable transitions where one finger stays put from one chord to the next, C and A minor share neither the same string nor the same finger: the challenge of this first switch is therefore entirely about how fast you can move a finger, not about coordinating several fingers moving at once. It is actually a great exercise to start with, because it isolates a single problem at a time, before you tackle chords that ask you to coordinate several fingers together.

F major adds exactly that second finger: index on the E string at the 1st fret, middle on the G string at the 2nd fret, teaching you to coordinate two points of contact at once. G major, on the other hand, asks you to spread three fingers across different frets, index, ring and middle, which makes it noticeably harder to place cleanly for a beginner's hand. Many methods have you play G7 instead while your fingers get stronger and more flexible: it is a more compact chord, with less of a stretch between fingers, that keeps the same dominant harmonic function before you move on to a full G major.

A common learning order therefore runs in five steps: C, A minor, F, G7, then G major, each chord adding just one new difficulty compared with the one before rather than changing everything at once. With these five shapes under your fingers, you already cover a good share of the pop, folk and Hawaiian songs most often played on ukulele, just as a handful of open chords is enough to cover most of the guitar repertoire.

Ukulele versus guitar: what changes beyond the chords

Beyond the chords alone, guitar and ukulele differ in almost everything to do with the mechanics of playing. The vibrating string length, called the scale, runs around 65 centimetres on a classical guitar, against roughly 33 centimetres on a soprano ukulele: the frets sit much closer together, which demands less of a stretch between fingers but also more precision, since there is that much less room to land on the wrong fret. The ukulele's nylon strings, besides feeling gentler under the fingers than steel, are also under far less tension: it takes noticeably less force to press them down against a fret, which partly offsets the extra precision demanded by closer-together frets.

The right hand follows a different logic too. On a guitar, you strum or pick often with a pick, at a good distance from the bridge for a full sound. On a ukulele, you almost always play with your fingers, thumb and index leading the way, right up close to the sound hole, in a looser, quicker wrist motion inherited directly from the technique of the Portuguese machete it descends from. The resulting sound is logically quieter: a ukulele's small body projects far less than a guitar's, which makes it a living-room or take-along instrument rather than one built to carry a whole band without amplification.

The capo, so useful on guitar for staying on easy chord shapes while changing key, also exists in a miniature version for ukulele and works on exactly the same principle. But it matters less there: most ukulele chords are already played within the first three frets, where a guitar pushes much sooner toward uncomfortable barre chords further up the neck. This overall compactness, combined with far less weight and bulk than a guitar, explains why the ukulele has become the travel instrument par excellence, the one you slip into a bag rather than a hard case.

The entry price follows the same logic: a decent ukulele generally costs noticeably less than a decent guitar, since the body and neck need less raw material and less build time. For a beginner still hesitating to invest in an instrument, or a parent kitting out a child without knowing whether they will stick with it, that price gap weighs just as much as ease of play in the decision to start with ukulele rather than guitar.

An excellent first instrument, especially for a child

The ukulele has four nylon strings, under far less tension than a guitar's steel strings, so they hurt the fingers less at the very start, a real advantage before protective calluses have had time to form. The neck is shorter and thinner, which suits a small hand particularly well: a seven-year-old can already hold a soprano comfortably, whereas a guitar, even a reduced-size one, is often still cumbersome at that age. And as you have just seen, the very first chords need only one finger, where a guitar often demands two or three spread fingers from the first chords onward.

This quick learning curve means a child, or any adult beginner, can play a real song within the first sessions instead of wearing themselves out on barre chords for months. It is precisely for these same reasons, lower cost, quick learning, minimal bulk, that the ukulele has become, over the past few decades, one of the most widely used instruments in primary school music programmes, in the United States and beyond, to the point of rivalling the recorder in some classrooms. It is a direct echo, more than a century later, of King Kalākaua's policy of bringing the ukulele into Hawaiian schools back in the late 19th century.

The habits built on ukulele, reading a chord name, changing chords in time, transfer very well afterwards to guitar or piano if you want to branch out later.

Ukulele sizes: soprano, concert, tenor, baritone

The soprano is the smallest and most common size, with a total length of around 53 cm for a scale, the vibrating portion of the string, of around 33 cm: it carries the bright, chiming tone most associated with the ukulele. The concert grows a little, to around 58 cm long for a 38 cm scale, with a bit more spacing between frets, often more comfortable for adult hands: this in-between size developed in the 1920s, when players asked for something a little louder than the original soprano without losing its character. The tenor goes further still, around 66 cm long for a 43 cm scale, with more sustain and a rounder tone, favoured by players who stick with the instrument beyond the first few months. All three sizes share the same reentrant G-C-E-A tuning: only comfort, volume and sustain change, not the chords you learn.

The baritone, larger still at 74 to 76 cm long, stands apart: it is tuned D-G-B-E, which matches exactly the four highest strings of a guitar, not the G-C-E-A tuning of the rest of the ukulele family. Its creation dates to around 1950: banjo player Eddie Connors is said to have designed it at the request of radio and television host Arthur Godfrey, a major promoter of the ukulele in the United States, before the Boston-based maker Vega brought it to market under the name Arthur Godfrey Baritone Ukulele De Luxe around 1950. Guitar builder Herk Favilla is said to have independently developed a similar version of his own, designed precisely to ease a beginner guitarist's transition to a four-string instrument.

The chords you learn on a soprano, concert or tenor are therefore not played the same way on a baritone. That is exactly what makes the baritone appealing to a guitarist: its chord shapes borrow directly from the guitar, the reverse of the trap described earlier for the other three sizes, since it was designed from the start as a bridge between the two instruments rather than as one more variation on the traditional Hawaiian tuning.

Common pitfalls to avoid

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