When I first started out I did "Uncle Rod's Boot Camp". Just google it and do the free download. Basically a lot of intersting chord progression andmsome great learning strategies. I would work with a metronome to increase speed, then incorporate different strum patterns. Now I fingerpick it with different patterns.
I work on songs a lot now and if a chord progression or change is tough I break it down and go really slow. That is a great way to improve at any level.
If I'm really getting stuck on a particular tune, or even just a couple of phrases in a tune, that won't come out "just right", I'll put it to one side and do something else. Maybe try it on a different instrument, whistle, recorder, mandolin, guitar, whatever ... just to get the "feel of it" lodged in my head, then come back to it a few hours/days later on the ukulele ... often then it just "clicks"!!
The secret seems to be :
Don't keep practicing and making mistakes.
You're only learning to make mistakes
A few scales can be useful, especially if the tune is one of the more "inconvenient" keys.
Chord progressions ... I learn them as I need them for a tune. Chord progressions just for their own sake can easily mean that many tunes in any given key sound boringly similar. Flashy tricks for maybe making a one-time impression on a knowledgeable player, to the wider audience ... same old same old!!
As I've only been playing just over a month it's still early days for me. From playing the Flute I would say it is doing a good warm up including hand exercises, scales, arpeggios, and have some fun. I would make sure you play at least 10 minutes a day minimum, for me with the woodwind instrument I found an hour was about right, but that would change per instrument.
Learning to play things that seem too hard - often by just progressing a few measures at a time. Sometimes what makes the most progress is taking a few days off.
Really agree with katysax! I imagine it's not for everyone, but I have definitely found that sometimes taking a break is really beneficial. Maybe it's like a reset, or something! I've found this in so many aspects of my life, too! My day-job is making comics, and when I was at uni, we had it drilled into our heads that we needed to practise for four hours a day, every day, without fail, or we'd be terrible artists. That's practise, not even just work. Practise. This absolutely does not work for me and it took so long to figure that out! A few days' break really benefits me, if I can get it! Just sayin'... what works for some might not for others! Try all sorts of methods!
At this point the best practice for me comes through learning songs. I specifically pick songs that I like and that have something in them that I would like to learn or add to my playing. That could be new set of chords or new inversions of chords I already know, maybe a new picking or strumming patterns or anything else that the song has to offer that I just want to get better at.
Another thing that has been a part of my practice right now includes learning the melody of a song, then adding the harmony (more of a double stop style of soloing) and then working on improvising from there.
