Help I can't stop noodling!

[Nickie]

I am not sure what is meant by "noodling". I play a lot of songs, and generally start with the slower stuff and work into the harder ones, playing each a few times, trying to get my timing and transitions as smooth as I can. I will also work on any new stuff we're doing with the band. At 70 years old, it's all about having fun with the uke, not trying to "master" it...

Thank you. I gave up trying to master the ukulele a long time ago. I just wanna have fun, too, and not make too many mistakes.

 

[Nickie]

A lot of "noodling" in this discussion That's good.

I spent about 2 years noodling around just learning chords that are used in most common sequences: (Maj, Dom7, min, min7, dim 7, and Maj7) in all "playable" keys. (For me, it's C-D-Eb-E-F-G-A-Bb.) During that time I collected perhaps a few dozen paper songbooks and twice that in .pdf songbooks. All were good resources, but I was completely overwhelmed.

After about 3 years, I bought the first (yellow) Daily Ukulele To Go. Everything changed. I knew many of the chords and could finally focus on learning songs! I am sometimes tempted to dig into all these other resources but I keep returning to this book.

Why? Because it has a huge variety of genres, tempos, strumming, and melody lines, and it has the most popular pop and "jazzy" chord sequences all in one place. Focus. Focus. Focus. What is in here is transferrable to many other songs you may want to learn.

Do I try to play them all? Absolutely not. I play only the ones I might want to try to sing along with.

When you learn the songs in the Yellow Book, as we call it, why not try out the Blue Book, the Leap Year Edition?