I promised myself that I was going to keep it simple, but dang, I'm starting to accumulate a lot of books. And most of them pretty much say the same thing. Note to self, "there is no magic book that will make me a good ukulele player. Practice more, and quit buying every silly ukulele book that comes along."
I think a lot of us fall into the "buy every uke book you find" mentality at first. Five years into playing, the only books I still have are Fretboard Roadmaps and the Sakuma chord book for reference, and John King's and Tony Mizen's arrangements. And those arrangements are challenging enough that they're all I'll need in this lifetime
I tried to resist the urge but succumbed and bought two books on Kindle, a modest enough investment. Only downside of these is that illustrations are not always big enough on the iPad. So I have bought some dead tree books:
Kiwi Ukulele
Juke'n The Uke
101 Ukulele licks
and hopefully these will do for now but...
Then again there are quite a lot of books here. When I retired I bought the biggest book shelf that I could find to get things in order. It wasn't big enough. I'm still wrestling with the problem of which books to let go.
Within reason :biglaugh: I don't think you can have too many music books ... however, they don't all have to be ukulele-specific books. Music arranged for the descant/soprano recorder fits on a ukulele perfectly, being written with C as the lowest note, as will most whistle music, which is usually annotated for a D instrument, though some tunes will stretch to two octaves, which is getting a little optimistic on a "high-G" tuned ukulele. Nevertheless, there are a lot of good tunes available that haven't necessarily been "tabbed" for the ukulele, if you can read music.
I now stack my books directly on the cases so at least the ukes might get a little smarter by osmosis or subatomic particle exchange. Then the process should reverse when I am holding the instrument. But I'm not sure what happens if I try to play some blues on a classically trained uke? Except that I will still suck at both. That's why I bought a guitar.
I have eight books now. Two are the Daily Ukulele and the Daily Ukulele Leap Year. I use both those books quite a bit. The others are beginner ukulele books, and while they are all different, they are the same. They just present everything a little differently, but when you get right down to it, it is the same information, and that same information is available on any number of on line ukulele sites. Not only do I have four books with the same information in them, I've probably bookmarked a dozen sites on the internet with the same information. Anyway, of the eight, I wish that I had not spent the money for five of them. Ukulele books are not cheap, and they take up space.
It is not just ukuleles though either. I have shelves and shelves of drawing and painting books that all say the same thing as well, most of which I wish that I hadn't spent money on. There is a lot of art tutorials on the internet. I think that I am so conscious about it because when I retired, I decided to be an artist. I sort of went all out on it, and now I have boxes full of "art junk", as I call it. Just stuff that I bought. Some gimmick that I saw someone else had and I thought I should have one too. Some collapsible containers that I never use, or some weird brush that I thought that I needed. Every imaginable type and hardness of pencils. A dozen pencil extenders, most of which don't work. Just a lot of stuff. Pencil holders and pencil boxes. After years of drawing and painting, I've found that most of that stuff I never use. It gets thrown in a box, and if I hadn't spent so much money on it, I would throw it away. Anyway, I sort of promised myself that the ukulele was not going to end up that way. So I'm kind of sensitive to that "accumulation of ukulele stuff." I don't want my house looking like Ukulele Central. Yesterday I noticed that the top of the hutch is filling up, and I don't like that.
Well, Rllink, I'm afraid you're no different than the rest of America. I have Archery stuff galore in my closet and in the garage. I have unused Caligraphy stuff in boxes in the closet. Four bicycles (one's a tandem) clutter my garage. Golf clubs, unpublished or half finished books and short stories, Spanish language studies and a lot of my college English material are all stashed around the house.
And there are the piano books, the French horn books, the tuba books, the drum exersize books, the euphonium/baritone books, many different flute, fife and recorder books, harmonica books. And also there are theory books, books on singing and music history and on and on. And last but certainly not least are my numerous ukulele song and exercise books. I have even more books than these, but I'd have to browse through them to see
what else I have. I didn't even count the magazines.
When I played golf, I had a bunch of how-to golf books. One was by Arnold Palmer. In it, he said that one should pick a book/author that he liked and follow him only. It made sense to me, so that's what I did. I didn't play any better, but I still think it's a good idea.
I guess all that stuff is why we're all so hot to make a lot of money. ld:
On yes my middle aged friends we come from an era of books and stuff. Back in the 60s-70s I loved going to the library........... the ultimate place for seeking knowledge, we found knowledge in books. That is why us baby boomers continue to buy books. old habits die hard
Stuff, do not get me started on stuff. George Carlin's bit about stuff was so right on " The whole meaning of our lives is getting stuff. Your house is just a place for your stuff. Your house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. Your house keeps all your stuff safe while you go out and get MORE stuff"
Rliink you have been strong about the one uke thing. I understand because I was the same as you in the past with different hobbies, fishing, hunting, golfing, my house looks like a sporting goods store because of all my STUFF
When I was a lad, I usta go to the library after school and stay until supper time sometimes. In the Air Force I usta go on my lunch hour. I even put book marks in books so I could read them to pass the time. But the nearest Library to me now doesn't have any music stuff that I want to read. I'd rather go to Barnes and Noble.
The last years I've had to push myself to read fiction (except for Louis L'Amore), but I'm gettin' better. ld:
I've been known to frequent the public library a time or two, but our public library does not have much for ukulele books, and the ones they have say the same thing as the ones I have. So the problem with the library is that you can look at them and see that they do not have the magic chapter that makes it all easy. Which is what those books on the internet are supposed to do. Why can I not realize that it is more practice that makes me a better ukulele player, not more books?
So what got me going yesterday was all the books that I have bought and sheet music that I have printed out, all the tutorials and PDFs, all piled on top of the hutch in the dining room. I was grumbling about it, out loud and with colorful language, as it was all falling on the floor while I was trying to get one of the Daily Ukulele books out of the pile, and my wife came up to see why I was having a fit. She suggested that I go though it all, box up what I don't use, and take it up to my art studio. That made me angry, not with my wife, but with myself, because I got to thinking how did I get myself into this situation so quickly that I have to take labeled boxes of ukulele stuff and pile it on top of labeled boxes of art stuff in my studio, which will eventually become a store room if I continue to do that. So here we are, and now a big part of that pile from the hutch is in boxes up in the art studio, never to be looked at again.
So like I said, I put all the stuff that I'm not using in boxes and took them up to my studio. But my wife just came up with a big boot box that she had covered both the top and the bottom with Christmas paper. And it has a big bow on it too. Then she took all the books and sheet music that is still on the hutch, driving me crazy, and put it inside the box, and put that under the Christmas tree, which is right beside my chair that I like to sit in all the time. So now it is all right here beside me, and it just looks like a Christmas present. She is very clever.
As I said before, Rllink, it's an American thang. Everyone works as many hours as they can and goes on strikes and gets an extra job (maybe paid under the table) all so they can buy stuff and stack it in the garage or attic. When I walk down the street I see garages that will just barely hold the cars. Some don't even have room for cars. Did you see any of the black Friday shoppers on TV?
I know people whose Christmas gifts under the enormous tree fill half the living room. All that stuff's gotta go somewhere.
So stop worrying about your stuff. Just stack it up somewhere and forget about it. My wife and I were gonna buy the place next door and use one of the bedrooms for storage, but the deal fell through.
What we all need is bigger houses for all our stuff. ld:
Some of you might enjoy this wonderful essay entitled "Stuff." I didn't write it but wish I had; it definitely changed my relationship with "stuff."
I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, the poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyone is so poor that they can't afford a front yard full of old cars.
It wasn't always this way. Stuff used to be rare and valuable. You can still see evidence of that if you look for it. For example, in my house in Cambridge, which was built in 1876, the bedrooms don't have closets. In those days people's stuff fit in a chest of drawers. Even as recently as a few decades ago there was a lot less stuff. When I look back at photos from the 1970s, I'm surprised how empty houses look. As a kid I had what I thought was a huge fleet of toy cars, but they'd be dwarfed by the number of toys my nephews have. All together my Matchboxes and Corgis took up about a third of the surface of my bed. In my nephews' rooms the bed is the only clear space.
Stuff has gotten a lot cheaper, but our attitudes toward it haven't changed correspondingly. We overvalue stuff.
That was a big problem for me when I had no money. I felt poor, and stuff seemed valuable, so almost instinctively I accumulated it. Friends would leave something behind when they moved, or I'd see something as I was walking down the street on trash night (beware of anything you find yourself describing as "perfectly good"), or I'd find something in almost new condition for a tenth its retail price at a garage sale. And pow, more stuff.
In fact these free or nearly free things weren't bargains, because they were worth even less than they cost. Most of the stuff I accumulated was worthless, because I didn't need it.
What I didn't understand was that the value of some new acquisition wasn't the difference between its retail price and what I paid for it. It was the value I derived from it. Stuff is an extremely illiquid asset. Unless you have some plan for selling that valuable thing you got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it's "worth?" The only way you're ever going to extract any value from it is to use it. And if you don't have any immediate use for it, you probably never will.
Companies that sell stuff have spent huge sums training us to think stuff is still valuable. But it would be closer to the truth to treat stuff as worthless.
In fact, worse than worthless, because once you've accumulated a certain amount of stuff, it starts to own you rather than the other way around. I know of one couple who couldn't retire to the town they preferred because they couldn't afford a place there big enough for all their stuff. Their house isn't theirs; it's their stuff's.
And unless you're extremely organized, a house full of stuff can be very depressing. A cluttered room saps one's spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there's less room for people in a room full of stuff. But there's more going on than that. I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what's around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting.
(This could explain why clutter doesn't seem to bother kids as much as adults. Kids are less perceptive. They build a coarser model of their surroundings, and this consumes less energy.)
I first realized the worthlessness of stuff when I lived in Italy for a year. All I took with me was one large backpack of stuff. The rest of my stuff I left in my landlady's attic back in the US. And you know what? All I missed were some of the books. By the end of the year I couldn't even remember what else I had stored in that attic.
And yet when I got back I didn't discard so much as a box of it. Throw away a perfectly good rotary telephone? I might need that one day.
The really painful thing to recall is not just that I accumulated all this useless stuff, but that I often spent money I desperately needed on stuff that I didn't.
Why would I do that? Because the people whose job is to sell you stuff are really, really good at it. The average 25 year old is no match for companies that have spent years figuring out how to get you to spend money on stuff. They make the experience of buying stuff so pleasant that "shopping" becomes a leisure activity.
How do you protect yourself from these people? It can't be easy. I'm a fairly skeptical person, and their tricks worked on me well into my thirties. But one thing that might work is to ask yourself, before buying something, "is this going to make my life noticeably better?"
A friend of mine cured herself of a clothes buying habit by asking herself before she bought anything "Am I going to wear this all the time?" If she couldn't convince herself that something she was thinking of buying would become one of those few things she wore all the time, she wouldn't buy it. I think that would work for any kind of purchase. Before you buy anything, ask yourself: will this be something I use constantly? Or is it just something nice? Or worse still, a mere bargain?
The worst stuff in this respect may be stuff you don't use much because it's too good. Nothing owns you like fragile stuff. For example, the "good china" so many households have, and whose defining quality is not so much that it's fun to use, but that one must be especially careful not to break it.
Another way to resist acquiring stuff is to think of the overall cost of owning it. The purchase price is just the beginning. You're going to have to think about that thing for years—perhaps for the rest of your life. Every thing you own takes energy away from you. Some give more than they take. Those are the only things worth having.
I've now stopped accumulating stuff. Except books—but books are different. Books are more like a fluid than individual objects. It's not especially inconvenient to own several thousand books, whereas if you owned several thousand random possessions you'd be a local celebrity. But except for books, I now actively avoid stuff. If I want to spend money on some kind of treat, I'll take services over goods any day.
I'm not claiming this is because I've achieved some kind of zenlike detachment from material things. I'm talking about something more mundane. A historical change has taken place, and I've now realized it. Stuff used to be valuable, and now it's not.
In industrialized countries the same thing happened with food in the middle of the twentieth century. As food got cheaper (or we got richer; they're indistinguishable), eating too much started to be a bigger danger than eating too little. We've now reached that point with stuff. For most people, rich or poor, stuff has become a burden.
The good news is, if you're carrying a burden without knowing it, your life could be better than you realize. Imagine walking around for years with five pound ankle weights, then suddenly having them removed.
Whoa! Great article! So true! I am in the process of purging my home of stuff! Yarn, books, stuff. Got too many uke books and tons of things I've printed from the Internet. Problem is I spend more time looking for more uke stuff than I do playing the darn thing . . .
Well, back to the original subject. The big trouble with music books is that, rather than sitting at home slogging away, practicing, they are more interesting to shop for, and they hold forth the promise of a breakthrough in one's learning. Even though we know it ain't gonna happen.
At $20 a book, Rllink could have had $160 to spend on a new Uke! And he could probably get all his learning material on the Internet for free. Well, water over the dam.
I hope all you newbys are reading this thread. ld:
The trouble I have with music books is I know too much already. That might sound conceited, or like I'm so full of myself, but really, it's true. I'm lucky if I find two or three pages of material in any music book that's new to me. That's not to say I'm a fabulous player. That takes talent and practice, neither of which are mine in abundance. But I've studied music, read about it, and talked about it for 60 years. If I didn't know a lot about it by now, I'd have to be stupid. And, I'm not. Nevertheless, I keep being attracted to titles and cover art, and buying music books. Then I discover that I already know almost all the stuff that's in it. But like I said, knowing it, and being able to do it, are two different things. Wouldn't it be wonderful if one could acquire ability by simple eating the book. Yum ....! Now, back to practicing Travis Picking, which I could give a lecture on, but can't play steadily for more than a few measures without flubbing up.
Yep. The last week or so I have been busy. What had once been a master bedroom was metamorphosing into a store room. It was wasted as a store room, it's a nice light room; the windows face north and east so it gets sun for most of the day - provided there is any.
The idea of having a "music room" had considerable appeal so I sprung into action and cleared the room. (Well "sprung" might be an exaggeration but...) OK, there are fly rods in one corner of the room and the picures on the wall are military memorabillia in nature. It has taken forty six years to hang those pictures on the wall so it's not like I'm rushing things.
Two ukes are out and ready for instant action, as is the amplifier. The only books to hand are the three ukulele books. There is a third ukulele on a stand by my chair in the living room so no excuses for not practicing. Unless it's that I spend too much time reading UU?
Second that, and I'm wondering if a derail (or separate thread) for "What are your top must-have ukulele books?" might be in order? I stated mine earlier on but would be really curious to know what others' are.
I know... I been tempted to get more uke books, but after browsing then I have noticed they're pretty much the same, but I think buying books memorablia or uke "stuff" it's part of the UAS...
