I have played ukulele on and off from the age of eight and actually now have more income from uke students than from lute and guitar students put together. This has been a recent phenomenom, and YouTube has a lot to do with it, that and the economic downturn. Mostly people just want to strum pop songs, but I've been developing some repertoire for fingerstyle playing, including arrangements of baroque guitar pieces by Sanz and others, which I think work a LOT better than such music on a classical guitar. You can see and hear some of these pieces on this website [1]www.FingerstyleUke.com - in fact you can find there more than 70 mp3 files for free download alongside some videos.
As regards 4c guitar literature on the uke - I'm less of an enthusiast, but it can sound ok. The problem is the fourth string, which on a uke is up an octave - re-entrant - which is one of the reasons the music of Sanz sits happilly on the fretboard. Aquila is THE major string maker for ukuleles, and they do sell a set with a low 4th string, so in theory you could have exactly the same tuning as a 4c guitar, except for the single strings. Another instrument available over the net is the Taropatch Fiddle - not a fiddle, imagine a uke with double strings, and this could give you a more 4c-like sound for peanuts. BTW, Aquila also sell a gut set for uke! I currently have five students playing Sanz on the uke - none of whom had shown the slightest interest in so-called 'classical music' before. They are loving it, and three of them have bought baroque guitar CDs now. Rob MacKillop -- References 1. http://www.fingerstyleuke.com/ To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
