Ukulele Slack Key by David Heaukulani - Anyone else got this?

Ben_H

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I've just bought Ukulele Slack Key by David Heaukulani and getting stuck into it. Tunes sound great on my low D Pono baritone with Living Water Strings.

Anyone else got it or played through it? Would be good to have a discussion about your experience if you have.

Ben
 
Big fan of Uncle Dave! Love the book and the resources that go with it. Uncle Dave has a CD of Slack Key Bari on CDBaby:

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/davidheaukulani

After practicing with Uncle Dave's book for over two years, I've taken his advice and stayed slacked. Pretty much gave up on standard tuning altogether. When a new tutorial pops up from the UU folks, I end up transposing it to a slack-friendly key and work up my own version of it. Its quite fun.

Slack Key was new to me when I first started with the book so I found it helpful to listen to other versions of the songs, and I'm still finding new versions popping up from time to time.

I have infinite admiration for the slack key artists and am enjoying this journey more than I had thought possible!
 
Big fan of Uncle Dave! Love the book and the resources that go with it. Uncle Dave has a CD of Slack Key Bari on CDBaby:

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/davidheaukulani

After practicing with Uncle Dave's book for over two years, I've taken his advice and stayed slacked. Pretty much gave up on standard tuning altogether. When a new tutorial pops up from the UU folks, I end up transposing it to a slack-friendly key and work up my own version of it. Its quite fun.

Slack Key was new to me when I first started with the book so I found it helpful to listen to other versions of the songs, and I'm still finding new versions popping up from time to time.

I have infinite admiration for the slack key artists and am enjoying this journey more than I had thought possible!

Cool, I'm going to drop him an email as a couple of the links do not work very well. I'm totally new to slack key, just fancied trying something different.
 
it is a good book, nice licks and some good humour, web links are a bit of a mess.
 
it is a good book, nice licks and some good humour, web links are a bit of a mess.

I'm a bit further in now, it's quite good at throwing new ideas at you and then getting you to practice. Where I'm struggling somewhat is with his measure/bar structure, or rather (to my classically trained mind,) lack of it. It's fine when he indicates below the tab the length of the notes but when he doesn't I find it hard to follow and I don't find the video clips help me much. This may be because Slack Key style is laissez-faire rather than metronomic. I haven't listened to enough yet to get a handle on it.

As you say the quality of some of the clips is not good and I'm emailing him to point out one where I just couldn't hear what he was saying because the sound was distorted. I appreciate why he has done the clips the way he has though.
 
Just stick with it. I bought his book a few years back when I started Uking. I had already been playing slack key a while, so I had the basics. Comments above are correct, web links are a mess.

Edit: Thanks for the CDBaby link!
 
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Mark Kailana Nelson

Y'all have inspired me to buy Mr. Heaukulani's book. Order sent in.

Have y'all tried Mark Nelson's slack key book? Mark's Fingerpicking book has taught me mucho and I am ende3avoring to learn his Juke'n the Uke book.

I put in about five years worth of hard work into the Fingerpicking book and it has paid off royally.
 
not to take away from the intent of highlighting dave on this thread, but if you haven't looked at mark nelson's materials on slack key (taro patch) you really should take a look. He offers about nine lessons on playing slack key, available and downloadable on youtube, and his talent at both playing and teaching are inspiring. http://mark-o.com/ I have all of his books and play out of them a lot. His arrangements are really great and not too difficult for most players. lozark
 
not to take away from the intent of highlighting dave on this thread, but if you haven't looked at mark nelson's materials on slack key (taro patch) you really should take a look. He offers about nine lessons on playing slack key, available and downloadable on youtube, and his talent at both playing and teaching are inspiring. http://mark-o.com/ I have all of his books and play out of them a lot. His arrangements are really great and not too difficult for most players. lozark

Funnily enough I've got about 2/3 through the Mark Nelson Fingerstyle book and was getting a bit stale so was trying something else - hence Uncle David's Slack Key book.

I need to get on to youtube and try to listen to the pieces played as a whole song then I might get a feel for the timings. Just not getting that yet. I don't think it helps that part of my background is playing drums and percussion. If I can't feel the rhythm I struggle a bit. (Makes me very cranky when people in my uke group lose or add beats here or there by accident. :) )
 
I have both and much prefer Mark's but that is mainly because I am arrangement and song driven.

Y'all have inspired me to buy Mr. Heaukulani's book. Order sent in.

Have y'all tried Mark Nelson's slack key book? Mark's Fingerpicking book has taught me mucho and I am ende3avoring to learn his Juke'n the Uke book.

I put in about five years worth of hard work into the Fingerpicking book and it has paid off royally.
 
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