my ukulele progress

It is very good to meet you. I'm a night owl and the sun is rising, so it is high time for me to retire but I think I feel lucid enough to explain my opinion on the question of tonality. I think it is basically in the ear of the beholder. I'm not saying that someone is crazy if they hear a difference or that they are imposing some quality which isn't there. I'm just saying that the difference is a deal breaker to some people and to others, like me, it doesn't mean much. I guess I have broader definitions. If I fret the 8th fret of the E string and the tuner says it is a C, then I'm cool with that. The note may be a bit warm or bright or muted or brassy, but to me that's just the ukulele's voice and its take on the C note. I just go with the flow and over time accept the tone as natural and somewhat inevitable.

Okay, now I'm starting to slip away from lucidity, so I better just let that paragraph stand as is.
 
I found some interesting stuff.

First of all, I found the concept of a chromatic mediant progression. I really like the idea of a progression not based on a diatonic key. I mentioned previously a nice scale that I learnt as the Gypsy by I have seen it called by other names such as the Greek or the Byzantine or the Double Harmonic. What's in a name? The interesting thing is that it has regular intervals of a half step alternating with a step and a half.

In any case, the chromatic mediant also is not reliant on a key but rather moved mathematically. It progresses by moving a third. The example I have been playing goes:

A minor
F minor
Ab minor
C minor
A minor

You can certainly use other chord qualities, but why? Seriously, it works well with major triads although it is a little chipper for my taste. Minor 7's don't work as well because, I imagine, the inversions I am using are wrong.

Practicing does have some benefits. I was listening to a song entitled "I'm the Mountain" by Stoned Jesus. Immediately I was able to use the tonic shape of the pentatonic and nail down a reasonable facsimile. I didn't try to get it note for note. I merely did an impressionistic approximation. I just played what I had in memory. More likely than not, I misheard it or remembered it differently than it was. However, whatever tune was in my head I was able to get the ukulele to play it. In a way that is better then mere mimicry because i added something of myself to it although it is probably too close to the original.

The original was electirc with some fuzz thrown in, which reminds me that I still have to go down to the basement and get my drill and screw the neck onto my cigar box guitar so I can try playing this with my Fuzz Factory pedal.
 
I found an interesting scale. It is called the Hungarian major. The name isn't that important. What's important is that it has a major and minor third so that it works reasonably well with some blues. Even that's too much info, probably. Here's how to play it on a linear tuning.

1. G string. Fret a note with your index, then your pinky. (e.g., the C and the D#)
2. move to the C string and move one fret down. Fret the index, middle, and pinky fingers
3. move laterally to the E string and do the same thing.

For re-entrant tuning, the only difference is that you don't have to shift one fret down between steps one and two
 
It has been a dismaying evening. July 4th is undoubtably my least favorite day of the year. How is it that the lower strata of society cannot afford to buy vegetables and eat a balanced diet however they can find the funds to buy hundreds of dollars of incendiary devices? It may be patent that I don't care for the jingoism of July 4th and I have always had an aversion to any "ism"; I find people as individuals very pleasing because we all eat, poop, and want to be happy. But once an ism is invoked, whether it is patriotism or nationalism or some religious ism, then people become jerks. Moieties are formed and people do horrible things to others who aren't in their number.

To get through this evil time I did two things. First I finished an essential piece of scholarship. I finished studying the 6th book of Virgil's Aeneid. It is a double-edged sword (as all swords are): it is important however it is quite hackneyed since I have been forced to read this piece of literature many, many times in my life.

The other thing I did was more germane to this thread. I have been recently obsessed with using non-traditional scales as a springboard for improvisation. I have many scales that I gleaned from a Swedish heavy metal band in the 90's. They are a bunch of cool scales and I spent a little time mapping out their shapes for both linear and re-entrant tunings. I will be going through them by first practicing them so that I am comfortable with the scale and then I will try to mix things up and improvise with those notes. I think I shall be able to make a table in a word processor to represent the pattern for the sake of others, and then take a screenshot of the table. We'll see. At any rate, I have to do this, otherwise I would make astounding progress on my finger picking and we all know that we can't have that.
 
Screenshot from 2019-07-05 00-43-18.jpg

this a test whether or not I can upload a table representing my scales. This one, if it shows up, is called "Japanese." I don't know if it is actually akin to anything from Japan, but it certainly it odd visually.
 

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I've been wanking around with the Japanese scale. Please remember I didn't give it that name. I don't even know if its intervals actually approach anything Japanese. I have in my life consumed Asian art. I've been to Bunraku and Kabuki performances; I have spent many hours watching Wuxia movies. However I guess I wasn't observant enough. I can't name any Asian songs and I don't know if this scale resembles those songs. All I know is that this scale sounds a bit exotic and non-western.

The thing which is peculiar about the scale is the fact that it seems to be more horizontal than the modes which are more vertical. I have been having a lot of luck by combining It with minor pentatonics which isn't any revelation. If you look at the first triad of the Japanese scale, it is a minor chord.

The one thing I have been wanting to do is plug in my tenor guitar and use a fuzz pedal and maybe a flanger as well, in order to see what kind of sweet sounds I could get.
 
I've been away for a while but I am pleasantly amazed at the forum here. I didn't realize so many people were paranoid about using Patreon. The way I figure it: yeah, people could hack into my patreon account, or my amazon account, or my email...however, they could also just walk onto my porch during broad daylight, when everyone's at work, and take the information from my mailbox. Criminals abound, and they will exist with or without my worrying. So I don't worry.

Speaking about not worrying, I haven't been watching or reading any news and becoming paranoid. I've been playing around with the Enigmatic scale. I think I will go to the front porch right now and write it out on a staff so that I can visually see why it is enigmatic. I will report back shortly.

My wife overheard my playing and said that the scale was well-named because she didn't have a good idea where it was going.

Once I graphed the scale onto a staff I would easily see why. It has a lot of sharps (or flats). Its formula is:

I | #I | III | #IV | #V | #VI | VII

With that in mind, the Enigmatic deviates from the major scale four times and from the minor six times. From the little that I have observed so far, I think this is advantage. Since it isn't major or minor, it kind of works with both...although it also kind of doesn't. I have mostly been using minor stuff around the Enigmatic because that's just the way I am, and it seems to sound good. Maybe, since the minor and the Enigmatic both have some claim to dissonance, they work together. Something that is odd about this scale is the altered fourth and fifth. Those are fundamental intervals to music. They are common to both the major and the minor. However the Enigmatic thumbs its nose at that.

And in reference to how the scale maps out on the fretboard, I am really liking the five-fret spread on the second string of the scale. I never would have thought it.



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The other thing I am working: I have impressed with how logical dominant chords are. For example dom7, m7, and 9 chords all have barre chords with a root on each string. So I have been playing blues and minor blues progressions in all keys (so that I get all the chords) using all the different dominant chord barres from all over the neck. It is a bit of a mental challenge to break away from the cowboy chords which are set as default for us, but it is a good way to learn the fret board because you need to know where the root of the chord is.
 
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I've trended away from my previous projects, a) working on finger-style technique and b) working on exotic scales.

I am currently obsessed with movable shapes. I suppose I have to credit Brian Liu's ukulele videos on youtube. I always intellectually knew the importance of this concept, but I think my skill level wasn't up to the task. Nowadays, I can play whatever barre chord I want...as long as the stretch isn't too bad!

Using Abe Lagrimas' jazz ukulele book, I ascertained what chord qualities he, as a jazz performer, found essential. I added a few of my own to the mix. Now I have on one piece of graph paper certain chord qualities. Each of which have four shapes (with the root being on each of the four strings). My endeavor is to improvise all over the neck with these chords. The underlying goal is to re-enforce my knowledge of the fret board with these chords since I have to know the root note of each in order to play it.

In case anyone is interested, here are, to me, the central chords that I have chosen:

minor 6
minor 7
half-diminished
6
maj7
minor
7
9
sus4
major
augmented
13

ovbiously, these are quite a few chords. I have to take it little by little. I am going to start off by playing some blues progressions in the twelve keys. I will do this in both major and minor keys. I have already dipped my toe into this pool a little bit and have to admit it is quite illuminating and fun. We are all used to playing these chords using first position chords. Once you start moving around the fretboard to get different voicings of the chords, it still sounds appropriate but the pitches dip down or soar upwards and give a different vibe.

So that's the general outline: to start working with some basic dominant chords and then eventually start substituting some 9's or 6's or 13's.

This actually turns playing into one large song. You start, presumably with C and you mess around with lower or higher C's and F's and G's, then move to G, and you keep moving around the cirlce of fifths.

The one thing I have to ascertain is how far up the neck I can take these shapes. I have been playing with my Kamaka and my baritone, each of which have a full upper bout. But my custom yorkie has a nice Florentine cutaway and it remains to be seen how high I can practically make these shapes. All shapes are not created equal; some will undoubtably work farther up the neck. Time will tell.
 
I'm on a bit of a vacation and it shows. I haven't done much today. However, I just made my favorite meal, huevos rancheros--but I make it with a few alterations. Instead of a fried corn tortilla, I use an ad hoc baked garbanzo cake; I use home-made beans and rice; and I use two fried eggs. "Mexican" food has been in the news--namely that tacos aren't favored by a celebrity. To be honest, I don't even acknowledge the taco as Mexican food. I know that it is, but in my experience is more of a gringo food. My idea is that the taco is to Mexican food what a pumpkin spice latte is to coffee.

I am invoking whatever god guides the hand of luthiers, for tomorrow I am going to attempt to screw the neck of my cigar box guitar to its body. Any additional prayers will be welcomed.

I am indeed focusing on my chords this vacation. My finger picking will certainly atrophy but, as Napoleon learnt the hard way, you cannot find a war with two fronts. So I'm attacking chords. I think it logical to start with what I know, blues progressions. To that end I will memorize my basic dominant shapes, both my major and minor 7. As I earlier mentioned I want to use these to memorize the fret board better because you have to know the root of the chord and where that root resides on the keyboard. Yesterday I was playing around with two of the four dom13 shapes and having a good time. Hopefully the fun will continue.
 
Ugh! I just learnt that I cannot live without add9 and 7sus4 chords. I think I can squeeze them into my new essential barre chord sheet by squeezing down the standard 4X4 box that I use to represent my chords. For example, dom7 chords only need to be 4X3. Or maybe I can just omit the major and minor triads.
 
I was able to re-draw my one page of barre chords so that no space was wasted. When I did that I could easily accommodate my add9 and 7sus4 shapes. I even have room to spare in case I ever feel the need for the minor major 7 or something like that. But now my cup runneth over and I have to start getting acquainted with my barre sheet.

I have once again been apprised of the importance of consistency, muscle memory, and technique. I don't have UAS in the slightest. As a matter of fact, I pared my ukulele herd to two: A high G bright kamaka and a low G custom yorkie. My problem is that I also have a crappy $300 Kala baritone which is the ukulele that I keep out to collect cat hair, dust, and to be the ukulele I grab when I have a moment. The problem is that with the Kala I slouch over it to play. With my two other ukuleles i have straps. And I have straps set up so that I cannot see the fret board; I have to play by touch the way real musicians do. So I have lost contact with that muscle memory. I need to re-adapt my wrists to the correct angles...and I need to stop perpetuating this cognitive dissonance. I know what I need to do and I need to do it.

But enough of that. The thing that's worth chronicling are my m7 chords. I'm playing all over the fret board and the funny thing is that even though I can get down to the 19th fret with my Yorkie since it has a cutaway, I do it easier with my Kamaka which doesn't. I suppose once again muscle memory is the root cause. I'm just used to having that upper bout in my way and contorting the hand over it. I have no obstacles with the Yorkie but I think my hand still does the monkey paw up and over the imaginary upper bout. There is also some other facts involved. The Kamaka is also tuned a bit tighter and maybe the tighter strings lend themselves to easier fretting. That's kind of my intention anyway. My Kamaka is my tighter strummer and the Yorkie is my loose, muddy finger picker.

So I resolve to use my strapped ukuleles and play blindly and to investigate and annotate my success with the different barres. By the time I am done with this fetish, my finger picking will undoubtably have atrophied.
 
playing around with some 9 chords. The add9 has been quite a boon. When you work with just the dom9, sometimes it sounds flat. I don't mean musically flat, but rather somewhat pale or blah. To put that into practice, I messed around in that almost embarrassingly trite key, the lowly C, and put together something like a jazzy twelve-bar blues:

1. C maj7
2. F add9, for the quick change
3. C maj7
4. C7, just for some sonic movement
5. F add9
6. C sus2 (F add9 + C at an octave) for some sonic movement
7. C maj7
8. C maj7
9. G9
10. G9
11. G9sus4 + A7
12. Dm7+ G7


So that's just a standard old C blues with a ii V I turnaround. And with the magic of those new barre chords of mine you can move things around once you get bored of first position chords. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes jumping to another octave sounds just like a cool variation. Sometimes it sounds random and inappropriate. Maybe there's some obvious theory-reason that I should know about, but I don't. So I just play it by ear.
 
Today's started out great.

I had a nice breakfast of toasted millet porridge and a demitasse or two of decaffeinated mokka java.

Now I have set myself the task of translating a horrible passage in Vergil explicating metempsychosis which I need to get through in order to read what I want to read.

After that I intend on making some headway in realizing what to do with a m6 chord.

Since Ukantor had the temerity to call me abstruse, I think I will be more mainstream and focus on the most jejune progression, the I VI IV V. If it is good enough for pop stars it is good enough for me. However I will take the liberty of altering some of the chordal qualities and I think I will do it with an economy of movement, only using one shape. I will explain later today.

I have a good little tool, The Chord Wheel, and it among things offers the information that a 6 chord can be used where one would use a II chord or a IV chord. I have never really liked those substitutions. So instead of using the 6 as an alternative chord attribute in a traditional progression, I thought that I would try to use the shape of a 6 chord as a basis of a progression.

So I took that rather ubiquitous shape (it can be a m6, a 9, or a m7b5) which many of us know (e.g., it is G9 when played as 2212). If you consider the C string as the root and move it to 4434, then you get an Em6. Since I love the key of E, that's my I chord

C# is, of course, the VI of the key and if you just flatten the fingers out you get 4444, or a C#m7

to get the A, the IV of this key all you need to do is convert the 4444 to a 4454, and you get an A add9

move it up two frets, you get a B add9.

There you have it. A standard I VI IV V progression, using just one shape (with some help from the pinky). And speaking of the pinky, that little finger, moved around above the shape, can make for some interesting little variations to the sound.
 
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I just got up from a nap and I see the Kala thread is still going strong. I am not going to enter into it; it seems like a perfectly good place to offend someone and I need all the friends I have. I will say the one thing I don't understand is the $1500 elite Kala. I mean, the kala is what it is, which is a decent low-end ukulele. So why gussy it up and pretend that it is something else. That's like, instead of getting a Ferrari, you get an "elite" Jeep Wrangler. You can soup it up all you want, pimp it out as well as you can, and charge a lot of money for the effort...however it still isn't going to be a good sportscar; that's just not its nature.

Back on the home front, I have been pursuing the 6 chord a little further--trying to see what sounds lead to it and away from it. And I'm profiting by altering the shape to get other chords. It makes sense since the chords look similar that their notes work together. For example I have taking that old regular 6 shape

E6=4434

and by going up a fret on the E string, you get an add9 chord with the root on the E. E.g., 4454 is A add9

and by going up two frets on the E string, you get a 7sus4 chord with the root on the E. E.g., 7757 is B 7sus4.

So that's a good old fashioned I IV V progression with novel chord qualities.


That's fine, but I think for later this evening I should get back to basics and practice my maj7 chords. They are a bit more central than a dom13 chord (even though I am falling in love with that 5534 Edom13).


I was just reading an old Inspector Appleby mystery which I love because he, like me, is a trained philologist turned member of Scotland Yard. However, the thing that caught my eye were the dates for Galileo that appeared in the text. They are
1564-1642.

I immediately realized that I could use that as a progression. I V VI IV I VI IV II.

I'll see what I can do with it.
 
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I've been working on some "jazz" stuff. I put jazz in quotes because it isn't quite what people think when they think jazz. I use a lot of jazz chords and ideas, but I do my own thing with them. Same thing with the blues. I practice my pentatonics a lot, but I use my own strums and melodies. In fact, I never play blues. Why play old blues standards? That's why I have a CD player, so that I can listen to Willie Dixon. And making new blues songs is silly. For me, the blues is like Christmas songs: you cannot make new ones. Those genres are tied to a certain time period and we grant them certain allowances because of their historicity. Making new Christmas songs or blues songs results in something quite trite.

I reviewed my workbooks from Glen Rose. He has all these shapes and clusters of shapes. Now that I know more, I can see that his shapes are just the ii V I progression. The trick is to know which chord qualities to use. For example one cluster of shapes uses m7, 9, maj7. Other clusters use a 7b5, 7b9, m7 and others use m7, 13, 6.

One general pattern I see is: minor, dominant, maj7.

I saw that Glen Rose used the 7b9 and I thought, "crap! something else to learn." But as I looked the the 7b9 I realized that it is just the dom7 chord with the root moved up one fret. So I just have to stick to my plan and practice my dom7 shapes and I will know my 7b9 shapes as well.
 
Finally...the weekend is here. Before I go to the porch to study a few things, I thought I would annotate my appreciation of the ukulele world's breadth. There's a current thread on the forum pertaining to ukulele essential songs. The list left my mouth agape in wonder. As far as I am concerned the thread should be entitled something like "songs that make me embarrassed to have a ukulele." And that is what impressed me. The ukulele world encompasses a really broad array of players.

Although I note these differences I hope I don't seem supercilious (I wonder if one can gainsay the charge of being supercilious while using the word supercilious). I know this will sound odd in this day and age where Christians are trying to make their opinions on abortion the law of the land, but I was raised to have immediate and determined opinions...however I was taught that opinions are just opinions. They aren't true (except when they are); they are just a bunch of crap that works with your mind. So, yes, I do have definite opinions on the topic of ukulele but I don't have value judgments associated with those opinions. Yeah, maybe I'm a serious musician...but I'm not a good serious musician. I don't practice several hours a day like a real serious musician should. In fact I bet most singer/strummers are more accomplished in their chosen endeavor than I am.

In a nutshell, I realize that although traditional ukulele makes me shudder, that's just me. I don't think my opinion has any superiority over others. It isn't a matter of right and wrong. It is a matter of what works with my head. And my head would abandon the ukulele if I had to play songs written by others in lieu of playing my own junky thoughts.
 
I ran across an interesting ukulele reference. I was reading a Philip K. Dick novel in which people are stuck in alternate realities. It is too complicated to explicate, just take it for granted that we are in a world where creativity is the lynch-pin of that reality. Here's the thing:

"...you'll have to join the company symphony orchestra...What instrument do you play?

The uke.

Just a beginner, eh?"

That is the burden we have as ukulele players--that conception that this isn't a real instrument. Obviously any instrument can be anything in the right hands. That's probably why I don't like playing the typical stuff. Even though I do not play with anyone else, in my mind I am an ambassador for the legitimacy of the ukulele. I figure all of us have all the based covered. That girl on TV has the strum angle covered with her C-F-G songs (I guess it is really D-G-A since she's cheating with a capo). And I'll be on the other end of the spectrum.

I have to go eat before work, but I'll try to write up what I've been doing with chords.
 
Just as a change of pace I spent some time with my fuzz pedal and a flanger, and created some riffs with the subdominant shape of the pentatonic. My fuzz pedal has a built-in octave capability, so I threw in a lower octave and the sound was dark and wicked. Good times.

I was just reviewing an interesting Beginners' thread on the blues where, among other things, it was proscribed that a beginner be robotic. I disagree. I think if a beginner can be robotic, he or she has half the battle won. After all, you need to walk before you can run. You need to robotically learn the chords and the scales and the timing, and then move to an intermediate stage where you learn to swing the notes and to invest the music with some humanity. That was my methodology. I learnt the rudiments of the style and then I started introduce different chord qualities, I interspersed melodies with the chords in a stop-time format (this was actually very hard), I incorporated major pentatonics, engaged in call-and-response...and then eventually I moved on to spontaneous improv using the building blocks of the blues.

Nowadays the blues serves as a handmaiden to my current obsession with playing the entire 19 frets. My basic plan is to play typical blues progressions but to mix up the chords from all over the fret board. I really should be more organized and annotate the interesting things I am finding about the different keys. One big challenge will be mixing in some melodies. It will be difficult because I always play in E so that I am very familiar with all the notes and where they occur. But if, for example, I play in Ab, where are my tonic notes or my mediant notes or leading tone notes? And the shapes will be in a different order. In E the lowest shape is the subdominant and the dominant is the highest one on the low G uke (on the high G, they are the leading tone and tonic, respecitvely). In Ab the lowest shape is the tonic and the highest is the mediant. My head is starting to throb just thinking about it. Clearly the blues is more complicated than dominant chords and the I IV V.
 
I was playing around with linking up a ii V I progression with some pentatonic shapes. It went well. For the chord progression I used

F#m7b5 G7b9 Em7

For the Em7 I used the straight barre across the 7th fret. What is convenient about that chord is that that barre is also the bottom of the leading tone pentatonic shape, so that if I just keep the barre down, I can play the shape above it and then slide down to the dominant shape which has that good E note on the 4th fret.

I think that the next time I am here I will type out a 12 bar jazz progression I like. After all, the blues progression is the #1 most utilized form in jazz.
 
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