On almost every stringed instrument, the strings run from low to high as you move across them. A guitar, a bass, a violin, a cello — pluck them one by one from the thickest string to the thinnest and the pitch climbs steadily. The ukulele, in its most common tuning, does not do this. Its fourth string, the one closest to your face, is higher in pitch than the third. This isn’t a mistake, and it isn’t a mistuned instrument. It’s called reentrant tuning, and it’s a large part of why a ukulele sounds like a ukulele.
The standard tuning, laid out honestly
Soprano, concert and tenor ukuleles are normally tuned G–C–E–A, counting from the fourth string down to the first. Written with octave numbers, standard high-G tuning looks like this:
| String | Note (high G) | Note (low G) | Position in the chord |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4th (nearest your face) | G4 | G3 | Highest in high G, lowest in low G |
| 3rd | C4 | C4 | Lowest note in high-G tuning |
| 2nd | E4 | E4 | Middle |
| 1st (nearest the floor) | A4 | A4 | Highest |
Read the high-G column in string order and the pitches go G, C, E, A — up, then down, then up again. The pattern “re-enters” the octave instead of climbing through it, which is exactly what the word reentrant describes.
The classic memory aid for these four notes is the phrase “My dog has fleas”, sung on the open strings in order. If you’ve ever heard a ukulele player check their tuning by humming that, this is what they were doing.
Where the tuning came from
The ukulele descends from small Portuguese instruments, particularly the machete and the braguinha, brought to Hawaii by immigrants in the 1880s. Reentrant tuning was already a feature of that family of instruments, and it survived the ukulele’s development in Hawaii.
There’s also a practical reason it persisted. On a very short scale length like a soprano’s, a genuinely low fourth string is hard to make sound good: it needs to be thick and slack, which tends to give a dull, flabby tone. Keeping that string high sidesteps the problem entirely.
What reentrant tuning does to your sound
The consequence is that a strummed chord has no clear bass note at the bottom. All four strings live within roughly a single octave, tightly clustered. Strum a C chord and you don’t hear a foundation with notes stacked above it — you hear four notes in a narrow band, all close in pitch.
That’s the bright, jangly, slightly harp-like character people associate with the instrument. It cuts through an ensemble easily, because it occupies a register nothing else is fighting over, and it sits comfortably above a singing voice rather than competing with it.
Campanella: the technique reentrant tuning makes possible
Here’s the payoff that most beginners never hear about. Because the strings don’t ascend in order, you can often play a scale by taking one note from each string rather than moving up a single string.
Play a scale the ordinary way on one string and each note stops the previous one — your finger has to leave the fret. Play the same scale across four different strings and every note keeps ringing while the next one starts. The notes overlap and blur together like bells. This is called campanella style, from the Italian for “little bell”, and it’s one of the most beautiful things a solo ukulele can do. On a linear-tuned instrument it’s much harder to achieve.
So why do so many players switch to low G?
Low-G tuning drops the fourth string a full octave, to G3. The result is linear: the strings now ascend in order, like a guitar. Many players make this switch, and they have good reasons.
- More range downward. You gain roughly five extra low notes, which matters enormously when you’re arranging a melody that dips below middle C.
- Familiar logic. If you come from guitar or bass, linear tuning matches the mental map you already have.
- Fuller solo sound. Fingerstyle arrangements gain a real bass note under the chords, so a solo performance sounds less thin.
- Easier bass runs. Walking bass lines and alternating thumb patterns become practical.
What you give up is the shimmer. Campanella scales largely stop working, and the strum loses some of the characteristic brightness in exchange for weight.
Two practical notes if you want to try it. A low-G string is thicker, often wound, and needs to be sold as a low-G set — retuning your existing high-G string down an octave will just leave it slack and buzzing. And on some ukuleles the nut slot for the fourth string is too narrow for the thicker string, which may need widening slightly.
What doesn’t change
This is the part that reassures beginners: your chord shapes are identical in both tunings. Because the intervals between strings stay the same, a C shape is a C shape, an F shape is an F shape. Only the voicing changes — which note sits at the bottom of the chord.
Every chord chart, every song sheet, every fingering diagram works in either tuning. You can switch back and forth without relearning anything, which makes experimenting genuinely low-risk.
A note on the baritone
The baritone ukulele is the exception in the family. It’s tuned D–G–B–E, which matches the top four strings of a guitar, and it’s linear by default. Its chord shapes therefore differ from the rest of the ukulele family — a “G shape” on a baritone produces a different chord than on a soprano. If you own both, it’s worth being conscious of which instrument you’re holding.
Which should you choose?
- Strumming and singing, traditional Hawaiian repertoire, playing in a group: high G. This is the sound people expect.
- Fingerstyle arrangements, solo instrumental performance, melody work: low G, for the extra range.
- Campanella and bell-like solo playing: high G, without question.
- Unsure: start with high G. It’s what your instrument almost certainly came with, and a set of low-G strings is inexpensive enough to try later.
Conclusion
Reentrant tuning is the ukulele quietly refusing a convention that every other stringed instrument follows, and getting something distinctive in return. Once you know it’s there, a lot of things make sense: why the instrument sounds bright rather than deep, why campanella works, and why low-G players are chasing something quite different from the traditional sound.
If you’d like to explore this hands-on, the free ukulele courses on Cursa cover tuning, chord shapes, strumming patterns and fingerstyle technique — a practical way to hear the difference between high G and low G for yourself rather than just reading about it.
