Standard guitar-style worm and gear tuners, used on most ukuleles today, were designed for high-tension steel strings and respond slowly and inefficiently to a uke’s short scaled, nylon strings. The gear ratios on most ukuleles is 16:1 or higher. (Meaning it takes 16 full turns of the button to rotate the post 360 degrees) No wonder ukuleles are hard to tune! Plus, there is the weight issue with standard tuners, making ukuleles headstock heavy. The Graph Tech team decided to tackle these problems that have plagued uke players world-wide and created a new patent-pending technology that makes ukulele tuning and staying in tune a breeze!

Graph Tech’s Tune-a-lele machine heads are tailor-made to improve the performance and balance of your instrument. The team at Graph Tech figured out the correct gear ratio is 6:1 for a uke. Tune-a-leles are designed with a revolutionary 6:1 gear ratio, not a 14:1 or 16:1 which most ukes have now. While standard machine heads high gear ratios have you turning the button a lot to slowly produce any pitch change, Tune-a-leles are right in the sweet spot: they react immediately to any adjustment and allow for precise fine tuning. Tuning is fast and intuitive!

A guitar style machine head has a thing called backlash or play, where the string post slips a bit even though the button is static. This can cause major tuning problems. Even worse is backdrive, where the string tension causes the gear to unspool. A standard machine head design cannot achieve a 6:1 gear ratio without backdrive. The ingenious design of Tune-a-lele’s gear tunes the uke at an optimal 6:1 ratio, while preventing both backlash and backdrive for accurate, stable tuning.

Tune-a-leles weigh in at a mere 5 grams each – the lightest ever - making the combined weight of all four less than one standard metal machine head. Our machine heads balance the ukulele so it’s not headstock heavy, making the instrument more comfortable to hold and play. Tune-a-leles are made of a proprietary high-density polymer, reinforced with a stainless steel center to ensure durability.