Kala Waterman Ukulele Review: The Plastic Uke, Measured Against Kala’s Wooden One

Kala builds the Waterman out of molded plastic on purpose, fits it with the same Aquila strings it puts on its wooden instruments, and sells it to schools. It is the ukulele you take to a beach, a boat, a campsite or a classroom of eight-year-olds, and the only one on Kala’s list that does not care what the weather does.

What almost nobody writing about it does is put it next to a wooden ukulele from the same maker, measured the same way. Kala publishes the numbers for both. Do that and the answer changes depending on which size you were about to buy.

The Waterman is now two different ukuleles

Kala has rebuilt this line more than once, and the model codes are the only reliable way to tell which one is in front of you.

The original run was the Classic Waterman: KA-SWB and KA-CWB in flat solid colors, KA-SWF in fluorescents, KA-SWG in glow-in-the-dark, KA-SWT in clear. ABS composite throughout, Aquila Super Nylgut strings. Around 2022 the same instrument was renamed the Beach Collection and the codes became KA-WMS and KA-WMG, with the colors given names — Black Sand, Sea Foam Green, Sunset Orange, Pink Dusk.

What Kala builds today is two collections side by side:

• The Recycled Waterman (KA-R-WMS and KA-R-WMG), soprano and concert. Kala’s own description is that “the ukulele body and neck for each are made using 100% Global Recycled Standard sourced plastic and they are strung with Aquila’s B-Blacks Strings made from renewable plant sources.”
• The Sea Glass Waterman (KA-WMT), soprano only. Transparent, gloss finish, ABS composite, Aquila Super Nylgut. Kala lists the nut and saddle on these as ABS composite too.

So the two current Watermans do not have the same strings on them, which matters more than it sounds. Aquila’s B-Blacks are a patented Italian bioplastic made from renewable plant material rather than fossil-derived polymer, in thinner gauges than Nylgut — .65, .82, .97 and .70 mm for a soprano or concert set. Aquila’s claim for them is a faster, more powerful response than fluorocarbon and a richer tone than Nylgut. Super Nylgut is the string Kala fits to almost everything else it builds, including the wooden KA-15 line.

One thing to clear up, because it is in the search results and not in Kala’s catalog: there has never been a Waterman color called Chalkboard Black. The instrument people mean by that is the flat black one — KA-CWB-BK when this line started, and Black Sand today.

Kala’s numbers, plastic against wood

Every figure here is Kala’s own, taken from its measurement block for each model, so the four instruments were measured the same way by the same company.

Two rows in that table decide almost everything about how the instrument behaves, and neither of them is the one people look at.

The soprano has a small box; the concert does not

The Waterman soprano and Kala’s wooden KA-15S soprano are within a sixteenth of an inch of each other on scale length, so they play at the same size and take the same strings. Their bodies are not the same size at all. The plastic one is 6-1/4″ across the lower bout against the wooden one’s 7″, and shallower with it — three quarters of an inch narrower on an instrument that only has six or seven to begin with.

That is a real reduction in the air the soundboard is pushing, and it is the most likely reason the Waterman soprano gets described as thin and quiet more often than the concert does. It is a molded shape rather than a bent one, and Kala evidently kept it tight.

The concert goes the other way. At 8-5/16″ across and 2-1/2″ deep it is fractionally larger in both directions than Kala’s own wooden concert, which is the only place in the range where the plastic instrument has the bigger body. If you are buying a Waterman to actually play rather than to keep in a rucksack, that is the whole argument for spending the extra ten dollars.

What it sounds like, without the flattery

Quieter and simpler than wood, with a short decay and not much bloom under a strum. Owners who like theirs are consistent about the terms: it is fun, it is cheap, and it is the one they hand to a child or take on a kayak. Owners who do not like theirs are equally specific — one describes it as sounding like elastic bands on a shoebox, with no resonance and very little volume, while conceding the body is sturdy and does exactly what it claims about water. Amazon’s own summary of the review body is that buyers find it a great value for beginners while sound quality and tuning retention get mixed reactions.

Both of those are describing the same instrument accurately. Plastic is stiff and light, it does not have wood’s internal damping, and a molded box does not develop the way a wooden one is supposed to. The Waterman is not a cheap version of a wooden ukulele. It is a different instrument that happens to cost about the same as Kala’s cheapest wooden one, and it is better than that one at exactly one thing.

Which is worth saying plainly: if the ukulele is going to sit on a stand in a living room and get picked up for half an hour a night, buy a wooden one. The Waterman earns its place when the alternative is not taking an instrument at all.

It will not hold pitch for the first week, and that is normal

The single most common complaint about the Waterman is that it will not stay in tune. Almost all of it is new strings rather than the instrument. Aquila’s synthetic ukulele strings stretch for several days after they go on, and every ukulele shipped with a fresh set does this — the Waterman just gets bought by more first-time players, who have nothing to compare it against and reasonably conclude the ukulele is faulty.

Tune it three or four times a day for the first week and it settles. What genuinely does not help is the hardware: the tuners are proper geared open-gear machines rather than friction pegs, which is the right call at this money, but the nut and saddle are molded composite rather than the Graph Tech NuBone that Kala fits to its wooden KA-15 line, and plastic nut slots are more prone to binding a string than a hard synthetic bone is. If a string jumps sharp when you bend it up to pitch, that is the nut, not the tuner.

A clip-on tuner is not optional on this instrument for the first fortnight. It is also the cheapest thing on this page.

The concert has the narrowest neck in the range

This one runs against every instinct. Bigger ukulele, more room for your fingers — except the Waterman concert measures 1-5/16″ at the nut against the soprano’s 1-3/8″, and against 1.39″ on Kala’s wooden concert. The plastic concert is the tightest fingerboard of the four instruments in the table.

What the concert buys you is not width but length: an inch and an eighth more scale, so the frets are further apart and a first-position chord stops feeling cramped. Eighteen frets against the soprano’s twelve is the other half of it — the soprano simply runs out of fingerboard where the neck meets the body, which is fine for song accompaniment and a hard stop for anything else.

If you have large hands and the string spacing is what worries you, no Waterman is the answer and a wider-necked instrument in a bigger size is.

What is in the box, and what is not

Kala includes a logo tote bag and a mini quick-start guide. The tote is a drawstring sack, not a case: it keeps dust and sand off and will do nothing at all if the instrument is sat on. On a wooden ukulele that would be a problem worth solving. On this one it mostly is not, which is the point of the instrument — a school teacher buying a class set has bought something that survives being handled by thirty children, and the bag is beside the point.

There is no strap button. Kala lists one on its wooden KA-15 line and lists none on any Waterman, and the tail of the instrument is bare in every photograph of it. So an ordinary strap will not fit, and the choice is a soundhole hook strap or drilling a hole in a $69 instrument.

The usual objection to hook straps is that the whole weight of the ukulele ends up hanging off the edge of the soundhole, which is worth thinking about on a thin solid-wood top with a finish you care about. On a molded plastic soundboard it is a non-issue — the Waterman is the one ukulele where the cheapest attachment method is also the correct one. The three ways a strap gets onto a ukulele covers the other two if you are curious.

Kala publishes no weight for the Waterman, so any figure you see quoted for one is a shipping weight with the carton in it.

The three Watermans, and what else to spend on

The two things to buy with it

Where the plastic ukulele came from

Kala’s own description of the Waterman says it pays homage to the Maccaferri ukuleles of the 1950s, and the debt is real.

Mario Maccaferri was already famous for something else entirely: in 1931 he ran a new guitar department for Selmer in France and designed the guitar Django Reinhardt made his name on. He moved to New York, went into plastics, and in 1949 launched the Islander — a ukulele molded from Dow Styron in eight separate parts, its shape based on a Martin Style 0 soprano, sold for $5.95.

Arthur Godfrey pushed it on television without taking a cent for doing so, and the thing went off like a rocket. By March 1950 the factory was finishing a ukulele every thirty seconds — about 2,500 a day — and then went to 6,000 a day to clear the backlog. Maccaferri sold the plastic-instrument business in 1969, by which point more than nine million of them had gone out the door.

That is the reason a plastic ukulele is not a novelty and a plastic violin would be. It has been the mass-market instrument of this family for seventy-five years, and the Waterman is a straightforward descendant — molded body, molded neck, molded fingerboard, and a price that means nobody has to be careful with it. What Kala changed was the strings: an Islander shipped on whatever nylon was cheap, and a Waterman ships on the same Aquila sets Kala puts on instruments costing three times as much.

Who should buy one

Buy the concert if you want one plastic ukulele and you intend to play it. Buy the soprano if it is for a child under about seven, or for a class set, or for something that lives permanently in a bag. Buy the Sea Glass if the look is what sold it and you do not need eighteen frets.

Do not buy any of them as your only ukulele if you are learning seriously and it will live indoors. At $69 the concert Waterman costs the same as Kala’s wooden soprano and sixteen dollars less than its wooden concert, and the wooden ones have a NuBone nut and saddle, a bigger sound and somewhere to go. The Waterman’s case is that a wooden ukulele cannot come to the beach, and it does not need any other case than that. What the body is made of is the fork this whole decision sits on.