Just wanted to introduce myself. My name is Donovan Preza and I live in Hilo, Hawaii and I'm transitioning into building ukuleles again. I had a short life break from woodworking and instruments but now I'm back at it. I have only been lurking here for a couple of weeks but I'm impressed by the conversations and level of craftsmanship on this forum. I was referred to this site by David Hurd who has been kind enough to share his knowledge with me in the recent months.
Attached is a picture (camera phone) of an ukulele I made and finished 5 or 6 years ago but started approximately 10 years ago. At the time, I knew nothing about compliance mapping, chladni patterns and the like. But I recently tested it (this past weekend) to try and figure out what I did right because it came out pretty good sounding. It's a little stiff but has decent coupling. The compliance mapping confirmed that it was a little too stiff and the tap tones confirmed the back and front were coupling pretty well together (about 2 semitones apart). What an experience it was! I was stoked to see the results. I started this build 10 years ago using a printout of a picture on Kawika's website of his 5 fan bracing and tried to imitate it because I knew what I was building at that time was way overbuilt. I used Audacity for the tap tones. I read up a bit on the Visual Analyzer but could not get it to work for me as well (and I did read the how to on this forum). I will try again later but for now Audacity does enough for my current level of understanding with everything at the moment. Currently have another tenor ukulele in progress which I'm in the process of tuning the back right now.
Hope to learn a lot from this forum and eventually be able to contribute more to the conversations
donovan
