Second lesson was yesterday, and I must say it was significantly more fun than the first one, although overall the pace is quite slow. Continuing where we left off last week, our teacher had prepared an arrangement of Amazing Grace, with hammer-on's and pull-off's as ornaments. I think he meant to spend only a few minutes on this particular song, but it ended up taking almost half an hour. I noticed that I can't quite pull off one of the pull-offs (pun intended) so I will work on that.
Up next he taught us a strum pattern that involves damping the strings. Being a bass player, I tend to gravitate towards finger picking so my strum technique is quite poor. I found myself playing it ever so slightly different than he does (right hand technique-wise) so forced myself to perform the strum exactly the way it's being taught. After all, I am there to learn and he is there to teach
For next week, we will apparently work on an arrangement of "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head" in which said strum is partially employed.
Someone mentioned the blues, and I played a simple turnaround exercise from the Ukulele Aerobics book to show that yes, you can play the blues on an uke. Our teacher picked up on it and played some more licks - it sounded brilliant! So he may throw his schedule out the window and focus on the blues instead for the next couple of lessons. No complaints here!
After the lesson I walked to my car with one of the students, and she told me that several people have quit after the first instalment of lessons (keep in mind this is the Beginner Course Level 2 - I was never aware of level 1) because they expected, and I quote: "... to learn 3 chords and then play songs." Instead, they learned around 12 chords, a good bit of songs and several strum techniques, which was deemed "too technical" by some. Truth be told, I wouldn't mind if things went a bit quicker, but as my misses pointed out, not everyone in the class already plays an instrument. And really, my main motivation for enrolling has been to get motivated about practicing daily, if only for 15 minutes. So far, that seems to be working quite well :music: