The L.Luthier Le Maho is a good value electro tenor ukulele, with lots going for it, from its all solid mahogany tonewood, to a built in pickup, through an excellent included gig bag to (most importantly), a lovely smooth and rich tone.

This Malaysian brand has ambitions of talking on brands like aNueNue and taking a seat at the top table of Far Eastern ukuleles, with their Chinese-made ukes doing a great job of demonstrating how serious they are to be considered real contenders. The build and finish is very good, with a nice thin gloss, and they play nicely too. Mind you… the first one I got out I exclaimed out loud to myself how slick the playing action was, and then remembered I’d already lowered it myself a couple of days beforehand and promptly forgot! You’ll certainly get an instrument that’s nice to play from World of Ukes, even if I don’t remember that I set it up!

The L.Luthier Le Maho has a built in active pickup, which offers a versatile blend of either undersaddle piezo pickup, or internal mic - which you can alter using discreet controls. With any system like this, the more mic you add to the blend the more likely you are to get feedback. But putting a little dash into the mix gives you a lovely, natural sound. Even using just the undersaddle pickup is perfectly fine and gives a great tone, so you can fiddle with it, or not, as you choose!

L.Luthier choose Savarez strings for their ukes, made in France. These are lovely, smooth-feeling strings which sustain well. They’re certainly part of the impressive overall acoustic tone, which has mahogany richness and yet still packs and punch in the trebles, all of which hits you through the side sound port - which delivers a little extra volume towards the player.

The nut width is 37mm, which combined with a fairly shallow neck profile makes it easy to reach around and get your fingers coming vertically down onto the fingerboard, making clean fretting straightforwad.

These are every inch the modern uke, with all sorts of different, unusual design features. They perform well and offer excellent value. Yes, it’s still a lot of money - but it packs a punch that impresses compared to lots of other ukes on the market at a similar price.

At the bottom of the page you’ll find options - standard across all ukes on my site - that you can add easily. These include strap buttons and low G fitting. You can ignore the case options as there’s a really well padded, smart gig bag with it.