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Reading the latest issue of "Ukulele Magazine," I spotted an ad for a new line of ukes from Lanikai that features compensated nuts and adjustable saddles. There's nothing new about the basic ideas, and the ad copy is a bit over the top (not to say misleading) in dismissing conventional compensated saddles. But it looks like they have come up with a really decent design for adjustable saddles to compensate individual strings. Check it out and see what you think:

http://lanikaiukes.com/laniblog/2013/03 ... s-tunauke/

I wonder how much, if any, this design affects energy transfer from the strings.

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D..

I will poke around tomorrow. If this is not available in Honolulu it is likely BS. The next place to check is with Music guy mike in Haleiwa.
The last try would be at the Ukulele Picnic in Honolulu around Valentines Day. If it isn't there, it does not exist in real terms.
I should have heard about this yesterday.

Bob

It/s only marketing if it doesn/t work, gore/gilet has an along detailed explanation of compensated nuts/saddlesin his book.

Lanikai is almost unknown in Waikiki and Honolulu from the stores that I visited. Each store had one or two Lanikai's but nobody had heard of this model.

Sad news, Music guy mike died this year. I did not see him last week but figured that it was his day off.

I hope to tour Kanale's factory in a week or so. I may get a competitor's opinion there.

Bob

I was at Ukulele Site in Haleiwa yesterday and spoke to someone who has seen and played the adjustable Lanikai.at the Namm show. It is ,as I had expected, peizo pickups cast into the four-part saddle. The uke is good when amplified but poor when played acoustic.

Bob

Good to know, Bob. Do you know why it sounds poor when not amplified? When I was in HI this summer, I played a number of "island-made" and "famous" brands, and really, most of them sounded no better (or worse) to my ear than the Lanakai I bought 10 years ago, and which I've used to help inform my 4 tenor builds. Do you think there's something about this adjustable saddle design that makes it sound poor?
Thanks for the input. I've been following an intonation thread on the Guitar forum closely and this nut/saddle compensation is a big part of the discussion.

On par in uke advertising, waist deep.

Compensated nut: cool idea. Not sure how effective across diff string brands/sizes. If there is one compensation amount that seemed to work all around, sign me up!

Movable saddles has that vintage 70's Gibson swagger, but seems like you want more solidness and less movieness in that region. I think building with low action and compensating the saddle to a specific string set is a better route.

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Pat

Cool enough idea. But it looks like what you end up with is a plastic tray for a bridge. The plastic saddle keys sit in a plastic holder which looks like its sitting on the uke top. Probably the reason the acoustic sound is poor.....Not many advocates for plastic bridges out there.
I've never really had a problem with intonation on my ukuleles with regular un-compensated bridges. Seems like a gimmick to me...but I bet its cheaper for Lanakai to make them

My best guess is that there is no solid connection between the saddle and the soundboard so that the energy of the plucked string is seriously reduced by the time it gets to the soundboard . The only movable saddles that I can remember are on electric guitars where the signal is magnetically picked-up so that the acoustic sound is irrelevant .

Just my opinion.

Bob

Looking at the closeup photo of the bridge, it appears that the bottom of the movable saddle pieces do not make contact with the bridge, so all of the contact between saddles and bridge is in the rails that the pieces slide in. That's what made me wonder how effectively the design transfers energy to the top.

I like the idea a lot and I may have to experiment with movable saddles.

As an aside, I guess I'm just an ignoramus, but for the life of me I can't see how compensating the nut affects anything but the open note. It seems to me that once you fret a string, the nut compensation on that string becomes moot.

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D..