Lanikai Curly Koa Concert Ukulele
The Lanikai Curly Koa series provide affordable koa ukuleles that look and sound great. These instruments are made in China and utilize laminates in their construction, which is pretty much a standard in this price range for koa ukuleles. Don’t let this deter you however as these are nicely constructed instruments with a quality sound.
Each ukulele has maple binding on the top and back with a nice maple inlay down the center of the back. It has an inlayed rosette that looks like abalone, but I don’t think it is. I can’t figure out what it is actually, but it looks nice. The body has a nice taper and produces a nice tone. The Lanikai curly koa line is very similar to Kala Brand’s koa line. In fact, they look identical in most instances. The only differences I can find are the inlay dots on the fretboard, the name on the headstock and the sticker inside!
I do like this ukulele and I think it’s a great purchase for someone looking for a nice looking and sounding ukulele in the under $300 price range. I don’t think you can go wrong with Lanikai, which is made by Hohner, a company known for quality instruments.
It has geared tuners for ease of tuning and an extended fretboard (20 frets). The extended fretboard is nice for hitting the occasional note way up there, but given the concert scale, the fret spacing around 18 and up doesn’t do much good if you have hands larger than a small child’s.
I have included another video to give a sample of the sound of this ukulele. Once again, I am struggling to get my webcam to produce a nice sound throughout, so please excuse the occasional sound distortions. I pick up my solid koa ukulele in this to give you a comparison to something else. To me the Lanikai, or any other uke in this price range, doesn’t have quite the sound of a solid koa uke, but they do sound very good regardless. And for a third the price of most solid koa ukes, they are worthy instruments.
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