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Ukulele

Harmony Soprano

Name: Harmony Soprano
Brand: Harmony

Harmony · Soprano Ukulele

Price: 51 EUR – 253 EUR

Price history

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Availability: 8/10 (Common)

A mass-produced 1920s-1960s Chicago-made ukulele that helped fuel the American ukulele boom: solid birch body with friction tuners and simple appointments, prized today as vintage rather than performance instruments.

Where available? Go to the best price – 53 EUR About this instrument

About the Harmony Soprano

Harmony's soprano ukuleles were built for volume and affordability during the ukulele's peak American popularity in the Jazz Age of the 1920s, and the company kept building similar models into the 1960s. Typical 1950s examples use solid birch construction with no internal bracing - the wood is simply built thicker to compensate - and a plastic fretboard screwed directly to the neck rather than glued, both cost-cutting measures that still produced a musically usable, if basic, instrument. Nut width runs around 1 3/8 inches on a roughly 13-inch scale.

Finish varied widely across Harmony's decades of production: plain natural or stained wood, painted decorative designs, and even licensed decal artwork appeared depending on the model and era, all fitted with simple friction (non-geared) tuning pegs. A soprano listed in Harmony's own 1959 catalog at $13.50 illustrates how firmly these were positioned as an affordable, mass-market instrument rather than a step-up model.

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Source: https://reverb.com/item/93186994-harmony-roy-smeck-uke-soprano-ukulele-1950s

Sound character of the Harmony Soprano

Solid birch with no internal bracing keeps the top stiff and simple, giving a boxy, percussive pluck rather than the sustained resonance of a braced, book-matched soundboard. Combined with the small soprano body, the result is a thin, bright, somewhat clattery tone typical of mass-produced mid-century ukuleles rather than a refined concert instrument.

Bright Delicate Vintage-voiced

Technical data for the Harmony Soprano

Body	Solid birch, unbraced
Fretboard	Plastic (screwed)
Nut width	~1 3/8"
Scale length	~13"
Tuners	Friction pegs
Produced	1920s-1960s

Price history for the Harmony Soprano

Cheapest seen: 51 EUR · Most expensive seen: 253 EUR

Cheapest seen Most expensive seen

The history of the Harmony Soprano

The Harmony Company, founded in Chicago in 1892, became one of America's largest musical instrument manufacturers by volume; its ukuleles - including models associated with performer Roy Smeck - rode the 1920s ukulele craze and remain among the most collected vintage American ukuleles, with early and specialty examples commanding significant prices decades later.