Last February, I bought one for myself, as my second musical instrument. Although I had been learning the piano for 6 years, I did not improve at all, for of course I did not practice much, and I was not fond of my own "sound". However, now it's a guitalele. I felt I could get along with this instrument, or at least I could enjoy a little.
However, as I kept on practicing, I had to encounter a sad fact. That is, I cannot play it like a normal guitar. As I wrote above, guitalele and guitar look similar, but they are completely different instruments. Normally a guitar has steel strings with a wide variety of picks. Guitalele, on the other hands, is equipped with nylon strings, and is more suitable for finger strumming and finger picking (Somebody told me LR Baggs will work well on nylon strings, though).
It did not bother me so much at first, but gradually I came to feel awkward at the different techniques which a guitalele requires. For example, it sounds "weird" when I strum down, down, down-up, and drown-up on Dolly Parton's Jolene. It does not play well, or the rhtym goes wrong, though I am sure my inmature techniques must be a reason. So, I often must sigh in front of tutorial youtube videos of the songs I want to play.
Still, arpeggio on guitalele sounds very sweet, for a guitalele makes relatively high sounds because of the shorter strings. That matches songs like Scarborough Fair, Time After Time, I'm Yours, and so on. C is almost heavenly, and sometimes I finger-pick on C chords over and over again, for no reason. And I still declare I love my own guitalele, for not being a guitar.
