Ukulele — Low G

About this instrument

The ukulele is of Portuguese origin, developed in the 1880s from small guitar-like instruments—the machete, cavaquinho, and rajão—brought to the Hawaiian Islands by Portuguese immigrants from Madeira, the Azores, and Cape Verde. Standard ukulele tuning is G–C–E–A, known as reentrant tuning: the G string sits higher in pitch than the adjacent C string, giving the instrument its characteristic bright, cheerful sound. Low-G tuning replaces this with a G string tuned one octave lower, creating a linear tuning where strings ascend in pitch from lowest to highest—the same pattern as most string instruments. This extends the range of the ukulele by five notes and creates a warmer, fuller sound with more bass content, making it particularly well suited to solo fingerpicking arrangements where bass lines and melody can be played simultaneously. Low-G tuning is most practical on concert and tenor-sized ukuleles; soprano ukuleles typically cannot support the heavier string. Arrangements on this page include both staff notation and tablature where noted.