I know that apologies are neither required or desired, but I am sorry to say that recently many thing have come between me and my ukulele. That seems to remind me of some lines of Yeats where he essentially says that many things tempt him from writing verse.
Anyway, I resolved a problem which had kept me in pain for the past year (a hip problem that rendered my legs different lengths). Now I am back into my competitive Olympic lifting as rehab.
With the passing of Philip Roth, whom I would argue is the greatest novelist of the 20th century, I have been revisiting his collected works.
It is a given, but work has been distracting me.
Nevertheless, I have found time for my music...although not as much as necessary. I have been making progress on my fingerstyle goals—moving from the mechanics of the thumb to pinching. It isn’t called pinching in my workbook, but it is essentially pinching: plucking a melody note with the “I” or “M” finger whilst plucking the thumb. I am pretty good at the linear tuning where the rhythm is outside/inside. However, the re-entrant and its inside/outside rhythm is still throwing me for a loop.
For the sake of variety I have been following the lead of every ukulele guru and have been thinking that chord melodies are where it is at. For some reason I had in my head the old tune “Bad to Me” which John Lennon wrote for Jerry Kramer and the Dakotas. I decided that I was going to just figure out the melody by myself without looking at any online resources. My assumption is that I might get the wrong key, but that I would figure out the the relationships of the notes regardless. So far the melody has alluded my efforts. However, it will come in time. My plan is to get the melody and then to embellish the melody with an arrangement of chords.
In between all this I of course have been noodling around with my pentatonics and I have been playing some simple progressions with 9 chords. I have been gravitating toward rootless 9 chords, as opposed to 9 chords with a suppressed dominant degree, because they are simpler to play.
Since my current obsession is the key of E, this has raised a particular problem. The problem is the I chord, the E. The problem is that the E chord and its IV chord, the A, are very similar and therefore not a lot of sonic movement occurs...at least, in the first positions of both these chords. And when I try a variety of E a little bit higher on the fretboard, the pitch is too high for what I am envisioning. I have been experimenting with different voicings for the E: the major triad, the 6, the maj7, the 9. They all sound good at times, and again bad at different times.
Lastly, I have been debating whether or not to bug the person who is making my custom uke. My uke was slotted for a July build. It is now September. However, it if was started late July, then it has only been a little more than a month, since this is early September. I don't know how long it takes to make a uke and I don't want to be a gadfly and say is it done, when he'll just say chill out; it takes time.