he act of substituting experimental materials for traditional ones in the process of string instrument building is as old as the craft itself. The gradual discovery and implementation of new and better tonewoods, appropriate uses of slab and bias-cut lumber, improvements in design, and gains in the sciences of physics and acoustics have all contributed to the constantly evolving creative act of luthiery. Interestingly, the motives for change are as varied as the changes themselves: popularity, availability of raw materials, new musical styles, old musical styles, demands of recording and broadcasting—or performing plugged-in or unplugged—improved sound and playability, etc. However, the one factor overarching all these is economics and the mantra that has driven mass production is to make things cheaper, faster.

Not surprisingly, cheaper and faster are rarely, if ever, better or even the same as traditional methods and materials. A central theme in marketing mass produced instruments, stringed or otherwise, is the creation of a myth—great sound and playabilty at a fraction of the cost—at odds with the convential wisdom that you get what you pay for. In 1946, plastic harmonica developer Finn H. Magnus claimed his polystyrene reeds were “just as resilient as brass” and produced “mellower tones” although the performer had to “blow a little harder for his music.” Harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler disagreed. “As a musician I couldn’t possibly use it,” Adler declared. “It does not have the necessary range of color and musical expression. The manufacture of the harmonica must be as painstaking as making lenses.” But at a tenth the cost of a Hohner, with six shiny colors to choose from and “making a noise likely to soothe anybody who likes the harmonica—except Larry Adler and his peers…” Well, you get the picture. Magnus reduced the number of parts to five and the assembly to one operation for his plastic mouth organ, compared to no fewer than eighty parts and one-hundred fifty operations for a simple Hohner Marine Band harmonica. His ingenuity paid off; it made him a millionaire.

The development in the first half of the 20th century of synthetic materials—plastics—which could be milled, molded, or drawn into virtually any shape, or designed for nearly any use, had a profound effect on the manufacture of objects in general and musical instruments in particular. Introduced into peripheral items such as tuning peg buttons and bindings, materials like pyralin, Bakelite and nylon were quickly expanded into use as integral vibration-transmitting parts like reeds, strings, and nuts and saddles, replacing cane, gut, wood, bone and ivory. While much of the development of plastics occured in the 1930s—most significantly, polystyrene and nylon—widespread commercial exploitaton did not take take place until after the Second World War.

In our own era change has been rapid and is nowhere more representative than in the ukulele family of instruments. Initially introduced into the Hawaiian Islands in the late 19th century, the forerunners to the ukulele (the machete and rajão) were constructed of woods native to the island of Madeira. Within twenty years of its importation the newly christened ukulele began to be made of Hawaiian hardwoods, most notably koa. Not only the backs and sides but the tops—traditionaly made of soft woods like spruce and pine—were made from the indigenous Hawaiian wood, a situation driven perhaps more by availabilty and cost rather than tonal considerations. The zenith of ukulele making in Hawaii was arguably reached by 1905, the year that Jose do Espirito Santo died. With the uke boom of the teens and twenties the mode of production moved from individuals hand-crafting instruments to factory operations both in Hawaii and on the mainland. As an enormously popular instrument, the uke was made incarnate in larger and larger forms from such seemingly disparate materials as wood, coconut shell, steel, tin, composition and plastic. With rare exception, the trend towards mass production lead to a cheapening of the instrument throughout the twentieth-century.

Consider the case of Harry E. Hall of Chicago, Illinois. When Hall filed a patent application in December 1925 for a mass-produced “sheet metal finger plate” for ukuleles, it was a milestone in the odyssey to low-cost and quick production. While Hall’s innovation eventually hit store shelves as a cheap brand called “Tru-Fret,” it had been his intention that the time and money saved by mass producing fingerboards would be lavished on better woods for the rest of the instrument: “Instruments of better tone quality than heretofore can be produced at a given price, not necessarily as a direct result of the tone qualities of the finger plate itself, as by reason of the great saving in price in the construction of the fingerboard, which makes it possible to put a better sound box in the instrument without increasing the total cost.” In practice the concept worked a little differently; inexpensive, mass produced fingerboards were attached to ukulele bodies made of inferior materials so as to further reduce costs and maximize profits. For instance, in the 1950s, ads for the Chicago manufacturer Harmony boasted that “Harmony creativeness and Harmony’s craftsmen teamed to produce this ingenious “Accurately Molded” polystyrene plastic fingerboard for moderately priced wood ukuleles. Offers fretting that is perfection itself. Mechanically exact - provides a freedom of technique hitherto unknown in low priced ukes.” Unfortunately the legacy left us by Harry E. Hall, at least with regard to ukulele construction, and notwithstanding his stated intentions, is this: vintage instruments constructed with molded, screw on fingerboards are the epitome of cheapness.