My guitar collection - Acoustics
Another great instrument from the Collings shop in Austin, TX. Compared to the UC1, this UT1 has an increased scale length of 17”. The body for Collings’ tenor ukulele has a width of 8⅝”, 11” length, and a depth 2⅞”, all giving it a total length of total length is 26½”. And compared to the UT1K, this more understated 1-style ukulele has an all Honduran mahogany construction with a satin nitrocellulose lacquer finish. It still has a similar tortoise with black and white purfling rosette, East-Indian rosewood bridge with bone saddle using a 111⁄16” string spacing, a neck with C-shaped profile, 12” radius East-Indian rosewood fingerboard with ivoroid dot position markers, 1⅜” wide bone nut, “Single-Point” headstock with ivoroid Collings logo inlaid in the East-Indian rosewood veneer, and 4:1 gear ratio Pegheds planetary gear tuning machines. It has an L.R. Baggs FiveO ukulele pickup installed. As an added bonus, this ukulele is old enough that Bill’s signature still graces the sound hole sticker. The case is made by Ameritage and has a tan interior. A 2016 snapshot of the relevant page on the old Collings website can be found here. Note the typo (2⅜”) for the body depth in the Specifications tab on that page.
Collings UT1
The story behind this ukulele
Ship date:
Serial number:
Customizations:
Strings:
When was this beauty built? This archived table of serial numbers from 2024 unfortunately is limited to concerts and tenors built between their introduction in 2009 and 2012. Clearly it had to be from well before July 2017 with Bill’s signature present on the sticker. Sending a message to Collings’ customer support revealed this UT1 is from September 2015, about a year before regular production of ukuleles ceased. But why a second ukulele in the first place? The simple answer can be found in the string set used on this one. Yes, it has a wound low-G just to compliment my more traditional UT1K. And here came the pleasant surprise. I thought I would be the one to have to make the potential slight slot modification to seat a wound low-G. But no. When I opened the case, this beauty already happened to be setup with my desired set. The same 2024 archived Collings Ukulele FAQ webpage as above states no modification is needed as long as the wound low-G has a diameter of .70mm or less. However, after navigating to SETUP and expanding the ‘Can I add a low “G” string to my ukulele?’ section on the current Ukulele FAQ, the text is a bit wordier and confirms an Aquila Nylgut AQ-15U set (G-C-E-A: .70mm-1.00mm-.84mm-.67mm) meets that diameter requirement. Unfortunately, Collings ukuleles are rather rare with regular production only between 2009-2016, even though there was an additional run of UC1K and UT1K ukuleles built in the late-2019 to 2021 time frame. The Southern Ukulele Store in Southbourne, England has a YouTube channel I can highly recommend. I do not exactly recall what episode it was, but I do remember the host mentioning, almost as an aside, how great that one Collings ukulele passing through the store was. And I have to concur though fully realizing I landed on this brand for a very particular reason. Still, there is not much else to say about these instruments than that they are just amazingly well built which in turn reflects itself in their playability and the richness of their sound.
