There's nothing wrong with rationalising something, if it allows you to explain to others your feelings about something, in this case, disappointment. You should sit in on a session and add something to it. I reviewed my feeling with the possibility I was wrong, and asking myself why I felt what I felt about what I was listening to, and that is what I felt. Oh no, not another uke.

Renaissance music also works very well on the tissue-and-comb. It doesn't mean that it should be performed on it. It also means that if the best the Uke can do is go back to a time when musical composition was simpler in many ways, chromatically above all (and yes, I am very much aware of its place in Quadrivium work, complete with mirror cannons) then it is an instrument which has its limits and which should not go into certain areas.

And yes, it is a bad workman who blames his tools, but it is a worse workman who insists on using a Chinese chisel when a Japanese one is available. And I absolutely agree with Guest 19 Aug 14 - 10:00 PM on the question of structure, although I would rather apply that to the set as a whole, than just one piece.

It might perhaps be a poor musician, if it were not that the musician in question was held out as being one of the best. In some respects, it was a Curate's Egg of a performance, there were some skills which could transfer to a better instrument and be creditable. But he didn't, and he held out his new instrument as being the epitome of its kind, which leaves me thinking that if that's the Ralph McTell of the Ukelele, I'd not like to discover the Johnny Cash of the medium - except that this is what we get, at least in the UK.

OK, we have many learners and in ten years time they might be worthwhile. But only if the instrument has it in it to allow them to: you can as easily waste ten years on paper-and-comb. And if it's a start to allow them to move onto something better (I'm thinking of the recorder here), then don't offer it to us as something fully-fledged and omnipuissant. It has a small place in Hawaiian music, and little more.