Looking for a music theory/Ukulele textbook

I've been playing with the Uke for eight months now. Actually, "playing" is not the word, "bumbling" is better.

I've learnt a bunch of tabs (picking/strums), but I've now hit what I think is the skill ceiling of someone who has no knowledge of western music and limited dexterity.

So I'm trying to do two things:

1. Learn a little bit of music theory. I know what scales are, how to form chords from scales, and the basic ideas behind simple chord progressions, but that's about it. It's all a bit muddled, and it's still just theory; I (obviously) can't identify chord progressions by ear, for instance.

2. Build finger dexterity. I know that beginner pianists are taught to play scales and arpeggios at increasing speeds to get used to the feel and sound of the piano. I'm looking to do similar things with the Uke, but I don't know how and where to begin.

Is there a book or video/tutorial set that provides a structured set of lessons from the basics, teaching music theory with the Uke in mind? How about a comprehensive source with exercises for building dexterity?

Here's Al Wood's comment about his "Ukulele for Dummies":

Back in the olden days, people learned to play a musical instrument in a pretty one-track fashion. They’d buy a book and work through it. Or they’d get a teacher and follow their syllabus. But no one learns like that any more. Everyone who learns the ukulele now plays stuff from websites and learns tunes for clubs. So the usual ukulele book that follows the old way doesn’t really work any more.

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This is not the kind of book I'm looking for. (I think I'm past the "My First Ukulele" kind of book.) Picking up snatches of tips and lessons from websites was okay at first but isn't helping me improve, I'm looking for something like a course.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

(EDIT: I would like to quickly add that I'm not saying "Ukulele for Dummies" is a beginner textbook, because it's not. It has some pretty advanced stuff for me, like combining chords and melodies. in a sense, I'm actually looking for something more basic.)

1. Ear training and music theory are sort of two separate skills. Although picking out songs by ear is a bit easier if you have some theory training, simply because it gives you a set of heuristics to lean on. But you can study theory all you want and still have bad ears.

Practice is the thing that really helps here, IMHO. If you want to get better at picking out chords and melodies by ear, you just have to start doing it. It's a slow slog at first, but you get better the more you do it.

That said, one good theory-related thing that really helped me was notating/reading the chords to songs using the Nashville Number System. It forces you to think of the chords in terms of their relationship to the key, rather than by their letter names. That, in turn, gets the ear recognizing that relationship, regardless of key.

I don't know of any structured method books for ukulele that go any higher than "Ukulele for Dummies" or Lil Rev's books. But there are books that have challenging arrangements, even if they're not presented in the larger context of theory, with a progressive sequence. John King's classical book is great, as are the Lyle Ritz ones. "Learn to Play Fingerstyle Solos for Ukulele" is also good, and has some easier pieces mixed in with the harder ones... might be a good start.

JJ

Jame Hill and J. Chalmers Doane's Ukulele in the Classroom series might be good for you. A lot of it may be review, but it is a structured approach to learning ukulele with musical literacy as the goal. The teachers' editions have more info than the student editions (but smaller scores).

TheOnlyUkeThatMatters said:

Jame Hill and J. Chalmers Doane's Ukulele in the Classroom series might be good for you. A lot of it may be review, but it is a structured approach to learning ukulele with musical literacy as the goal. The teachers' editions have more info than the student editions (but smaller scores).

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Ditto on this series, get the CD's that go with each book.