Too many hits on ukulele teacher to this one guy?

Jarmo_S

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Google, Youtube, whatever search I don't like see his over spirited act and I know there are other people whose teaching videos I would like to see much more.

I had my limit today sigh :(
 
I love his singing.
 
I respect John (The Ukulele Teacher) because he is reaching many players age 30 and below in a way that the “traditional” ukulele club movement is not. Younger players are not attracted to the social aspect of the instrument—they want to play their songs and to learn them in the privacy of their own home. John’s choice of repertoire is generally spot-on; and while he doesn’t always “teach,” he does occasionally do so, such as teaching about left hand muting in a new video covering 21 Pilot’s new “Jumpsuit.” He has over 1,000,000 subscribers on YouTube, a very respectable phone app, and endorsement from Kala. His singing isn’t great, but I think that many people consider themselves to sound as John does, and it gives people that normally wouldn’t sing the confidence to sing, too (as a voice teacher, this is important to me).

So, what I’d say is this: if you don’t like him, don’t watch the videos, but be aware there is an army of people who like what he does.

Army? Yes.

Ukulele Underground has a YouTube subscription base of 270,000. Cynthia Lin has about 210,000. Jake Shimabukuro has a following of 58,000 (even after his viral Central Park and TED Talk videos) and James Hill has about 62,000 subscribers. Mike Lynch has about 78,000. My own little channel, which I cannot monetize, has about 12,500 after a year, and the founder of the style of videos that I create has a following of about 21,000 subscribers.

It isn’t easy to develop a subscriber base of 100,000+, and it’s even harder to reach 1,000,000.

All that said, The Ukulele Teacher has room to grow. Grace VanderWaal has 2.7 million subscribers, and 21 Pilots has nearly 7 million subscribers.

It might not be about the numbers, but the numbers do matter when you talk about cultural trends and influence.

Finally, my respect for John’s work grew 1000% at last year’s Los Angeles Ukulele Festival. It is a great time, and Mitch does a great job of communicating. That said, the artists sent digital materials to Mitch, who then distributed them online. Participants were asked to make copies of those materials to bring to the event. I use an iPad, so it isn’t a problem—but most participants failed to bring anything. I saw many sessions where the instructors had to rework their entire presentation on the spot because the audience didn’t have access to the handouts. That included Victoria Vox, Lil’ Rev, Kalei Gamieo, and The Ukulele Teacher.

John took the opportunity to still try to teach the material, but then called kids (5-15) up on the stage to help him work through the songs. As a music teacher and as a teacher in general, I loved how he was able to drop everything and change things up to make it a worthwhile experience, and those kids will never forget that experience. The line to meet John after the presentation for pictures was LONG.

Someday, some of these young players will seek out community and find themselves in ukulele groups. Until that time, I’m glad that they have these resources to keep growing in the areas they find of interest, just as most people here at UU have their own areas of interest.

3C13ED86-C5C2-481F-8154-8238F3009C90.jpg

The photo is of John teaching at the 2018 LA Ukulele Festival
 
I think it's really important to remember that ukulele has a lot of different communities. The Ukulele Teacher (and 90% of YouTube teachers) are not for me, I don't really have any interest in strumming and singing, or learning 21 Pilots or Riptide or Camila Cabello. I don't personally enjoy his videos or his style.
Lots of people out there do, more power to them, and great for him too!

On the flip side I don't really have any interest in playing at a lot of the more traditional ukulele clubs, either... which again are a lot of strumming and singing, but this time to much older songs, and with a much older group participating. I'm in my 30s, so I'm no teenager, but I've been the youngest by 20-30 years at some clubs I have been to. But more power to them as well, I'm glad they enjoy what they do.

For me, I prefer learning and playing Hawai'ian music, so I'm mostly focused on watching videos and playing along to instrumentals, or going to concerts and events (or visiting the islands) where I can listen or join in on kanikapila.

The point is, there is a lot of variety out there and we have to be cool with that. It's easy for some of us to look down our nose a bit, too, at a guy teaching people to play pop songs on inexpensive ukes. This forum is dominated by people who have spent many hundreds, even many thousands on their instruments, and who listen to music by ukulele pros.

I think we need to move past that, and if we feel there are opportunities to broaden peoples' horizons beyond playing 3 chords on their Mahalo or Luna, we need to get out there and create our own videos or clubs or events to do so! And respect that sometimes these teachers are doing something really cool by broadening younger learners' horizons.
 
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I respect John (The Ukulele Teacher) because he is reaching many players age 30 and below in a way that the “traditional” ukulele club movement is not. Younger players are not attracted to the social aspect of the instrument—they want to play their songs and to learn them in the privacy of their own home. John’s choice of repertoire is generally spot-on; and while he doesn’t always “teach,” he does occasionally do so, such as teaching about left hand muting in a new video covering 21 Pilot’s new “Jumpsuit.” He has over 1,000,000 subscribers on YouTube, a very respectable phone app, and endorsement from Kala. His singing isn’t great, but I think that many people consider themselves to sound as John does, and it gives people that normally wouldn’t sing the confidence to sing, too (as a voice teacher, this is important to me).

So, what I’d say is this: if you don’t like him, don’t watch the videos, but be aware there is an army of people who like what he does.

Army? Yes.

Ukulele Underground has a YouTube subscription base of 270,000. Cynthia Lin has about 210,000. Jake Shimabukuro has a following of 58,000 (even after his viral Central Park and TED Talk videos) and James Hill has about 62,000 subscribers. Mike Lynch has about 78,000. My own little channel, which I cannot monetize, has about 12,500 after a year, and the founder of the style of videos that I create has a following of about 21,000 subscribers.

It isn’t easy to develop a subscriber base of 100,000+, and it’s even harder to reach 1,000,000.

All that said, The Ukulele Teacher has room to grow. Grace VanderWaal has 2.7 million subscribers, and 21 Pilots has nearly 7 million subscribers.

It might not be about the numbers, but the numbers do matter when you talk about cultural trends and influence.

Finally, my respect for John’s work grew 1000% at last year’s Los Angeles Ukulele Festival. It is a great time, and Mitch does a great job of communicating. That said, the artists sent digital materials to Mitch, who then distributed them online. Participants were asked to make copies of those materials to bring to the event. I use an iPad, so it isn’t a problem—but most participants failed to bring anything. I saw many sessions where the instructors had to rework their entire presentation on the spot because the audience didn’t have access to the handouts. That included Victoria Vox, Lil’ Rev, Kalei Gamieo, and The Ukulele Teacher.

John took the opportunity to still try to teach the material, but then called kids (5-15) up on the stage to help him work through the songs. As a music teacher and as a teacher in general, I loved how he was able to drop everything and change things up to make it a worthwhile experience, and those kids will never forget that experience. The line to meet John after the presentation for pictures was LONG.

Someday, some of these young players will seek out community and find themselves in ukulele groups. Until that time, I’m glad that they have these resources to keep growing in the areas they find of interest, just as most people here at UU have their own areas of interest.

View attachment 110592

The photo is of John teaching at the 2018 LA Ukulele Festival

I totally agree. Although I don't use his videos very often now, I really struggled to string together a few different chords when I first started, and his videos allowed me to get through whole songs. I may well have given up without them. These days I'm more likely to refer to Aldrine's videos, etc., or just look at tabs or cheat sheets, but there was a time when that would have been too difficult for me, and he provided exactly what I needed.
 
I think that how one searches has much to do with what comes up when they search. I don't think that he is some how worming his way into your searches, I think that it is how you are searching. If one types in "Ukuele Teacher", they are probably going to get a lot of videos and posts from "The Ukulele Teacher." Try being a bit more creative with your searches and maybe he won't come up so often. That said, I've played along with The Ukulele Teacher videos before. He is fun. I'm pretty much into playing songs.
 
He doesn’t bill himself as a singer so why knock his singing he’s only doing it to show how the song goes.
 
Some good points have been written in his defense. This is also I think an age thing that also was mentioned. I am 60 but it is not his singing that irritates me, but rather the "speaking" I want to shut up lol.

I do find it very unfortunate that he has been allowed such a generic nick. And then has become so popular, perhaps partly because of that. What I in my age would search when studying a new instrument first would most likely be a teacher keyword combined with the instrument in question. So I don't like Rllinks post above of having to be more creative. Come on, when you are a newbie. That is too much to ask.

As to myself I am not a newbie anymore with uke, but I have also this that I don't log into youtube and use incognito browsing. So building a bubble where to survive in this case better is not really an option. Besides don't like to live limited by a bubbles. Sometimes it is a bit hard though.
 
He doesn’t bill himself as a singer so why knock his singing he’s only doing it to show how the song goes.

The issue is the actual singing, which isn’t good. He just put up a great video for New York, New York, but the singing is so bad that it distracts me as I’m trying to play along. I still love that he sings anyway—and as I said previously, I think most people think they sound like him (they don’t...most are better) so hearing him boldly sing on the videos gives them confidence, too.

I am not saying that he shouldn’t sing. Quite the opposite. He can sing all he wants! But if there’s an elephant in someone’s living room, you have to bee able to acknowledge its presence.
 
Am I right in reading that the point of this thread is someone searching "ukulele teacher" and being cross that they get loads of results for the "ukulele teacher"? That's really made me smile! :)
 
I think the issue is that “The Ukulele Teacher” comes up so often on Google that the thought is that Kala has paid a lot of money to have his videos show up in the top of the search.

Perhaps that is true; but search engines also look at the frequency of searches and what people choose (remember: Google tracks EVERYTHING and then sells that information to advertisers) and search results are based on that, too.

With 1.1 million subscribers, the Ukulele Teacher is going to have far more searches and thus more search results, too.

As others have suggested, you can learn how to search by removing parameters.

I also have to caution about how we think of Kala. While Kala is doing quite well, it isn’t a huge company. I’d be surprised if there were more than 50 people working for Kala (in their US business—this does not count the Chinese companies that make their imported ukuleles). Even 50 might be an great overestimate.
 
When I started my ukulele journey I found his videos very helpful! They are tutorials and one should focus on the learning, rather than his singing.

I would say for the large number of searches and the audience he is a good fit.
If one wants to dive deeper then you will eventually discover UU+, Ukulele Way etc..
I think he is doing a good job getting folks who are just starting to learn on their way.
Maybe you need better search terms?
In other words, the world is working fine and you need to adjust..
I do not think Kala drives a ton of sales via him.. Kala has excellent instruments at good prices that are sold through many online and in person shops!
When he has give aways or promotions or reviews, it helps his youtube channel more than Kala sales in IMHO..
 
I'd be pretty surprised if Kala was paying Google a dime to advertise anybody except Kala. They are selling a monster amount of 'ukuleles without the uke teacher guy. It's good PR to give out free ukes and, with their cost, it's likely very cheap PR. Think about it: he already HAS a million highly-targeted followers without Kala paying to advertise his content in any way. Total no-brainer.

I'll also point out that Google owns Youtube. They make money when you use either site. Naturally, it benefits them to highlight one of their stars. A couple quick searches shows (at least for my cookies) that Duckduckgo and Yahoo only pull a couple hits for him before moving on to results that are more relevant.

The guy annoys the crap out of me, but he knows exactly what he's doing. If he didn't at first, he's figured it out now and is totally banking. Just look at his Patreon! Well played, business in the 21st century.
 
Perhaps that is true; but search engines also look at the frequency of searches and what people choose (remember: Google tracks EVERYTHING and then sells that information to advertisers) and search results are based on that, too.

Which is why I use Duckduckgo.com as my search engine, often even for YouTube videos. It doesn't filter or tailor search results based on what it thinks the user wants (with Google, if you click a lot of e.g. Reddit links, your search results will be biased toward Reddit), and it doesn't skew results in favor of sites and companies that pay. I get much better, broader results from DuckDuckGo than I did with Google.

I don't have an opinion on The Ukulele Teacher. I don't feel I'm his audience, but he promotes the instrument and does so in a rather personable way. Nothing wrong with that, it benefits the whole community.
 
well I have to say that I like the guy, yes he's a bit over the top, but if he has got over 1,000,000 subscribers, that takes some doing, I've learned some great songs from his channel, he promotes the Uke to a new generation of players, he also gives a fair number of ukes away so good luck to him
 
I have to agree with a lot of the sentiments in this thread. I don't like the style of the Ukulele Teacher at all. Too over the top, zero subtlety. That kind of presentation style seems to be targeted towards younger people, which in itself is of course fine. I don't have anything personal against the guy, and I think he's a decent source for new uke players specifically. Also, I haven't seen him give any actual bad advice, as opposed many other similar Youtubers.

However, as many of his peers, he falls into that category where he receives free instruments (mostly from Kala, as many have noted, but from others as well) but claims his videos are never sponsored. I find that to be quite disingenuous, not just in his case but in all cases. Sponsorship isn't only limited to money, just say you got sponsored by brand X by them sending you the instrument for free. I don't understand why these Youtubers, reviewers, etc. are so afraid to admit being sponsored. Thankfully they do disclose that they got sent the instrument, at least that's something.
 
SEO or site engine optimization is a thing... & there are many approaches to it, as there is monetization & all-things online (over)marketing.
This sort of overexposure happens to any & EVERY topic: evangelical religions, dog agility, sports, cooking, medical issues, the idiotic anti-vaccine "debate", cancer treatments... Every topic can & has been TonyRobbins-ized & ooze with scammy overmarketing.
It's a big world out there. Choose your influences & where you spend your efforts/time.
 
It is funny. I have never run across this guy. I guess it is a matter of inputting different lemmata and receiving different answers. When I use goggle, it is to inquire about a certain mode or a certain movable chord. I don't ask google how to play Taylor Swift songs. So I would suggest that if you don't like seeing the ukulele teacher in your search results, you need to look in the mirror and realize that he's a reflection of you and what you want. Therefore the only way to get rid of him is to up your game a bit and not ask musical questions whose answers will invoke his name.
 
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