Tomotaka Matsui on Lap Steel Ukulele

Tomotaka Matsui of the Sweet Hollywaiians at the Swallow Hill Ukulele Festival in Denver, February 7, 2009, playing a Mya-Moe (http://www.myamoeukuleles.com/) tenor resonator lap steel ukulele (that's a mouthful). The lap steel uke has a square neck and a raised nut. It was originally tuned to open C, but Matsui-san tuned it down to open G to play it.

I tried rotating the video so that it was upright, but that caused his head and part of the uke to be cut off, so I left it as-is.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Ukulele
• Uke
• Lap Steel
• Sweet Hollywaiians

[KevinTPorter]

DUDE, so legit! Did you just pick this up and learn it or were you trained? Excellent work, bro.

[densetsunotoki]

@KevinTPorter It's not me. The Sweet Hollywaiians were here for the Swallow Hill Uke Fest 2 years ago, and I managed to catch him at the Mya-Moe booth.

[densetsunotoki]

Mya-moe had a bunch of tenor resonator ukes there, but this one was specially-built to be a lap steel: it had a thick neck with a square cross-section, a higher nut and very high action, and had different bracing to handle the the higher string tension.

Not that you can't do it with any ukulele, it's just that this one was built for it.

[GibsonLesJosh]

Always asians doing something better than every one else lol!!

[Pengo115]

Thank you for posting. Nex time you deserves to be recorded alone without all the noise!

[garyjugert]

Thank you for posting this. I'd been wondering what my resonator might be useful for and now I know what I'll try.