Hey, hey, playing the ukulele.

FedEx delivered my ukulele this morning and I've started my on line lessons. Got through tuning, and now I'm strumming. Well, I was, but I'm taking a little break right now. But in a few minutes, I'm going to strum some more.

That's the spirit. Now find someone to play and practice with fairly soon in the process would be my suggestion. I started and quit cause I was on my own and lost almost two years that I regret now. Having someone to play with and push me made a ton of difference. Your milage may vary.

Rllink said:

FedEx delivered my ukulele this morning and I've started my on line lessons. Got through tuning, and now I'm strumming. Well, I was, but I'm taking a little break right now. But in a few minutes, I'm going to strum some more.

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try giveit100.com its a GREAT motivator and SO fun to watch the progress of others and try new things you see them try. LOADS of ukulele on there!

Here is my page:

https://giveit100.com/@pixiepurls/n9wk8h

pixiepurls said:

try giveit100.com its a GREAT motivator and SO fun to watch the progress of others and try new things you see them try. LOADS of ukulele on there!

Here is my page:

https://giveit100.com/@pixiepurls/n9wk8h

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Thanks pixiepurls!

Greetings and welcome. Glad you joined us. Lots to learn here. Good luck and good practice.

Hello and congrats on the new ukulele! You are beginning a very fun journey. Tons of fun.

Check out my series of 26 Basic Ukulele Lessons. Each one is only three minutes! They are posted on my website.

I've learned 16 chords now and am working on the chord progressions in some of my favorite Jimmy Buffett songs. Just learning to change them fast and keep strumming at the same time. There is a lot of chord changes in Pencil Thin Mustache, and I was working on that one for about an hour yesterday. So far so good. I'm not out there to become a virtuoso. I just want to strum away and have some fun. After a little over a week I think that things are shaping up. I've been picking out some notes as well. Just kids songs, but I'm recognizing the notes and my fingers are finding them most of the time. Anyway, that's the update. My wife thinks that I'm getting better, and that is all that counts.

You have a good memory if you know 16 chords already, lucky!

Thank you. I've discovered though that a lot of chords work off each other. A, Am, and A7 are three chords that are easy to bounce around. Throw an F in with those. Easy to get to an F from any of the As, easy to go from and F to an F7. I think there is another A chord that I was using yesterday that I don't remember what it is exactly. So they add up fast. G7 to C7 and G to C. I mean, how hard it is to throw those four together? Once I learn a chord, I try to learn a couple related chords to go with it. The D and the E give me some fits. I just cant get that finger bent fast enough on the D to allow that open A string to ring out. It takes a couple of moves to get the E in there tight enough, but it is all coming along.

Ditto to jimdville's lessons as well as uncle Rod's boot camp and great vids available here thru UU by aldrine. Check them out

bunnyf said:

Ditto to jimdville's lessons as well as uncle Rod's boot camp and great vids available here thru UU by aldrine. Check them out

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Uncle Rods Ukulele Boot Camp has been a great help getting started. MY approach to playing the ukulele is pretty much, find songs and play them. At this point, I'm just finding songs at ultimateguitar.com that I like, click on "ukulele" to get the ukulele chords, and then learning to play the chords for them. It is the approach that I learned from Uncle Rod. Find a song, learn the chords, put it all together. The chords that I can play is growing rapidly. I'm also working on different strumming patterns and applying them to the songs. I'm actually having a great time with it.

An update, I came back down to Puerto Rico for a couple of weeks and brought the ukulele with me. It was in a soft bag and I just threw it in my checked luggage and packed some clothes around it. It came through fine and I've been hitting it hard down here. Recently my wife has been singing along with me. That is really good, because it makes me slow down my strumming a little and forces me to change chords quicker and at the right time. I found with her singing along that I tend to strum too fast and my rhythm is off. I haven't started to sing along myself, but I intend to do that at some point. So I'm making progress. I'm not learning chords as fast as I was, but I'm learning some more complex chords and learning to switch between them smoother and quicker. So that is it.

OK, update, I'm back from Puerto Rico and the ukulele made the trip down and back just fine packed in my checked luggage. I've started singing along with some of the songs that I've found, and frankly, I think I sound pretty good. I have yet to sing where anyone can hear me though, my wife included. But when she is off doing something and I'm home alone, I really belt them out. I'm also getting some pretty good chord changes going, which really makes some of my songs sound a lot better. I've probably got around fifteen or twenty songs that I'm working on. Right now, my favorite song is Ghost Riders in the Sky. I think that I need to start picking a little and not just strum chords, but I'll get to that in due time.

Last night we had friends over for home made pizza and some wine. My wife is a marketing rep for a winery, so we always have wine around. So our guests had seen a post that I had made on facebook about Ukulele Aerobics and how that is my new workout, which I had just gotten in the mail yesterday, and they were inquiring about it. I don't know if it was the wine, or what, but I grabbed the uke and played the chords first for Ghost Riders in the Sky and then Stand by Your Man, as I am trying to learn all the songs from "The Blues Brothers." I didn't sing though. But the chords sounded pretty good and my guests were smiling and laughing while I was playing. Smiling and laughing in a good way. So that is progress. I really need to get past just strumming chords though. I'm hoping that Ukulele Aerobics will help guide me forward. We will see.

Wine always helps !!
Graham

This week I started working my way through Ukulele Aerobics. Prior to this week, I've been getting songs off the internet that I like and playing the chords for them. I started out with some basic chords, and then expanded my repertoir as new chords showed up in new songs that I wanted to learn how to play. So all in all, the list of chords that I can play has been growing quickly. But I've been wanting to get away from just strumming chords and move ahead. So the first week of Ukulele Aerobics has been very good at getting me to first of all play notes, and also to do some rudimentary fingerstyle playing, which actually turned out easier than I though it would be, especially after sitting in my recliner all evening and finger picking the strings in the style that the book taught. I just sat there for a long time picking the open strings while I watched the news on tv, then I started throwing in some of the chords that I was most familiar with and that was a lot of fun. So that is going well. Also the hammer on and pull offs are working fairly well. I need to work on them a little more though to get them smooth and consistent. I find that if I don't think about it too much it goes better. When I get to thinking about it, my fingers go all over the place.

So after a week of Ukulele Aerobics, I feel like I'm making good progress. The lessons are very short. Like two minutes, and it is tempting to just keep going, but I'm sticking to one lesson a day. When I've mastered the daily lesson, I go back and review what I've learned in previous lessons. I really think that hurrying through it is not going to ingrain the lessons into my muscle memory, so I'm careful to stick with what is in the book for each day. I really think that small bites is the secret to success. I'm in no hurry to get through the book. When I'm done with my daily lesson, then I just learn the chords for new songs and play around for a while.

So that is the report for this week. I'm feeling good about my progress at this point. I'm having fun.

pixiepurls said:

try giveit100.com its a GREAT motivator and SO fun to watch the progress of others and try new things you see them try. LOADS of ukulele on there!

Here is my page:

https://giveit100.com/@pixiepurls/n9wk8h

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pixie got me hooked on the site as well - https://giveit100.com/@JayMadison/nyjk3k

For beginners like me, you guys who have already been around probably know this. This morning I was just dicking around with my uke, learning to pick individual notes and I discovered that if you can play C Eb F Gb G Bb C, you can put them together almost any way you want, and they sound really good together. I was also pushing the strings around while I was doing it, and hammering on and pulling off as well. You can really make some good sounds doing that. You can also start back up the neck with the A string using the same notes and really get some fun sounds to come out of the uke. Try it. I think that I sat there for 45 minutes just making things up.

I'm up to week six in Ukulele Aerobics, plus I've been trying to find songs that I can practice what I'm learning. I'm putting in a half hour to an hour every day. The chords are all coming faster and easier. I'm starting to pick out notes and read music, so that is helping a lot, especially with the fingerstyle exercises. Each lesson seems to work off what has been learned previously, so it builds.

I ended up with one of the stock strings going bad, and I put on a new set of Aquila Nylgut strings. I think that the tone is a little better with the Aquilas, but I was a little disappointed because after all that I had read I expected a bigger change. Not that I didn't think that it sounded fine before, so maybe the strings that it came with were better than I was led to believe.

I've taken to practicing on the front deck in the afternoon before my neighbors get home from work on the weekdays at least. Saturday I was out on the front deck playing and the neighbor across the street came out to pull some weeds. She shouted something that I couldn't hear very well, so I walked across the street to talk to her. I told her that if my music was bothering her, she could pay me and I would play on the back deck. She laughed and said that she had specifically come out to listen to me play while she pulled weeds. So I guess that is a positive. She did refer to my uke as a little guitar, which did not offend me in any way. When I told her it was a ukulele, she said that she thought it was bigger than a ukulele. Instead of getting into a long discussion, I just told her it was in fact a ukulele, and she seemed more than happy to take my word for it.

So there we go. I'm making progress. Just a few weeks until the festival in Missouri and I am really looking forward to that. I think the experience will help my playing a lot. I'm excited to learn.