Kala U-Bass Celebration and Beginner Blues Bass Lesson

Spruce and Mahogany Kala U-Basses

​I don't care to do critical reviews much, so we're going to pass this one off as an instrument celebration.

My son is ten years old right now, and he has been playing upright bass this past year in his elementary school's beginning strings program. The big guy takes proper bass and piano lessons with a very good teacher, but I couldn't resist getting him a little something for extracurricular noodling. (Dad can't help using his kids as an excuse to buy more music gear.)

Enter the Kala U-Bass.  

The U-Bass is a brilliant little instrument. It's about the size of a tenor ukulele, has rubber strings that feel like they could be recycled car tires, an onboard tuner, and an onboard active pickup. But it is tuned exactly like an actual bass guitar. Brilliant!

The only real concern might be how embarrassing it is to strap this little thing to the roof of your station wagon when heading out on tour.

The U-Bass is super easy to play, and plugged into an amp it can sound amazingly close to an actual upright bass. In fact, the tone control offers a pretty wide range of available tones, and by dialing in some treble you can also mimic an electric bass well enough to get by. I have seen more than one band now with a bass player thumping on one of these. It looks a bit odd at first, but it works. And hauling the thing is a piece of cake.

There are two playability issues that could be of concern to some players. First, you'll need to get used to fretting a little farther off the fret than on a guitar. The strings are fat, and I find that landing the finger almost exactly in the middle between frets gets the least amount of buzzing and best tone. The second thing is that sliding doesn't work very well because the strings seem to bunch up. In other words, if you slide up to a higher fret, the note you are aiming for tends to go significantly flat. A player with a very light touch might be able to defeat this issue.

We picked up one of these for my son's birthday last year. Of course, I loved it so much that I grabbed another when I saw a good deal ($300 for the spruce top U-Bass with gig bag, some instructional books, and guitar cable, and decent amplifier) on Craigslist. Now we each have our own!

Since I usually like to share teaching materials on this blog, I have attached a 12-bar blues bass lesson that will get a beginning bass player or moonlighting guitarist going.

​Get a U-Bass. Play it. Celebrate!

basic_walking_blues_bass.pdf
File Size:	101 kb
File Type:	pdf

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Kala U-Bass