Introduction with a burning question: How to get from Mediocre to Advanced??

Hello fellow ukesters, nice to meet all of you, all the way from South East Asia. Signed up to this forum a long time back, but haven't said Hi~

A bit my background. I learned the organ from age 6 - 12, then changed to the piano from 13 - 16. But after that I stopped music because studies got in the way. Then soon I was studying abroad and couldn't lug a piano along with me and hence my interest in music kind of faded with the distance. Although I was never very good to begin with.

I'm 29 now and decided to reboot my journey with a portable instrument hence the ukulele. I've played for roughly 6 months and had a tad of guitar experience back in school, coupled with my music background I would say I'm not a beginner in music itself, but maybe a beginner to the uke.

However, I've reached this weird plateau where, since I don't have official structured training with the uke, I feel slightly lost in terms of progression. I can play several chords quite fluidly, and can do so with new chords if only I practiced them. But my interest isn't really in strumming but rather playing purely instrumental solo chord melodies, like how one would play a piece on the piano.

I'd spent the past month learning Corey Fujimoto's version of Canon in C (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MxIeb-fwWk) and am about 70% of the way, barring a few sticky fingering changes, fluidity, and producing that smooth/clean sound. But this took me more than a month just for a single piece. This is with roughly 30 - 60 mins practice every weekday and 2 hours on saturday and sunday. Is that normal?

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So my question is, how should I progress? I find myself stuck on how to get better other than attacking harder than life pieces that takes ages for my fingers to get used to... Is taking a month to learn a piece like that normal?

Should I be working on learning different chord positions/inversions before jumping blindly into tabbed complicated sheets? Should I sign up for online lessons or something?

Thank you in advance.

Welcome to the forums!! You may want to post your question in the Technique section of the forums as well. You might get more traffic there and get more answers.

Again, welcome!!

Thanks!

I thought I would but as my first post I thought I'll just introduce myself first while I'm at it. But thanks anyway. Look forward to learning more from all of you.

If you're willing to pay some money, James Hill's "The Ukulele Way" is a great course on playing solo chord melodies. It takes you from beginner all the way to pretty advanced; and not just learning tunes, but also being able to come up with your own arrangements. You can either buy the material as books, or pay a monthly subscription (about 7 US dollars) and get access to all the material online, including videos.

So unfortunately it's not free like so many youtube videos, but if you're willing to pay I think it's very useful.

Want to get better?

Play with people who are better than you.

Learn to play by ear.

Learn to transpose on the fly, rather than using a capo.

There are some books that will help (Fretboard Roadmap, as one example), Video Classes (Jim D'Ville does some great classes), and workshops at festivals (Sara Maisel/Craig Chee, for example).

And one of my favorite phrases, "Play, don't practice!"

You might want to try some simple tabs to get you going. I have several links to favorite uke tabs on our website for the Westside Ukulele Ensemble. http://www.westsideukes.com/favorite-ukulele-web-links/ I found the first two links very helpful: https://pdfminstrel.wordpress.com/ and http://ukulelehunt.com/2008/11/12/wilfried-weltis-ukulele-tabs/ Solo Ukulele fur Einsteiger
–Lori

I might suggest easier pieces to start out on. The term learning to crawl, walk then run applies to any musical instrument. With only 6 months of playing you have started on a difficult technical piece that intermediate players would find challenging

Practice, practice, and practice.

I'm still working my up to mediocre.

Seriously, there are load of instructional videos online, both free a paid. I've listed some below.

Brett McQueen
Chee & Maisel
Daniel Wrd
James Hill
Matt Dahlberg
Aldrine Guererro

ubulele said:

Look into the books by Mark Kailana Nelson, Rob McKillop and John King—lots of simpler material here, but of good quality.

Whatever style you intend to learn, I suggest that you pay particular attention to the locations of the roots in all your chord shapes and that you learn a number of generic, movable fretboard patterns to supplement the largely rote approach that most people take. Particularly, learn to derive virtually all your chord shapes from just a handful of template shapes. These patterns are especially useful for chord/melody arranging. One of the better books for such patterns is Ukulele Fretboard Roadmaps. Sadly, a number of the most useful patterns I've yet to see documented (or at least well-discussed) in the tutorial materials and videos I've canvassed.

With chord/melody arranging, you often need to work backwards from the melody notes to the associated chord roots. There are a few tricks that can save you a lot of time—again, ill-documented. After you've got more experience working with simpler material, contact me and I'll try to fill in some of the gaps.

Click to expand...

Thanks. I haven't done much of that myself. It's been more scattershot of learning chords. I'll look for the book or another source

wrestlingmatt51 said:

If you're willing to pay some money, James Hill's "The Ukulele Way" is a great course on playing solo chord melodies. It takes you from beginner all the way to pretty advanced; and not just learning tunes, but also being able to come up with your own arrangements. You can either buy the material as books, or pay a monthly subscription (about 7 US dollars) and get access to all the material online, including videos.

So unfortunately it's not free like so many youtube videos, but if you're willing to pay I think it's very useful.

Click to expand...

Thanks! I was actually looking into this. I signed up and tried out their sample videos. So far they are not bad. I would say his teaching quality is very good. I love them. Though I have yet to purchase a full subscription as I'm still being 'cheap' about finding the best material I want I guess.

It will definitely be part of my potential online lessons list. Thanks again.

DownUpDave said:

I might suggest easier pieces to start out on. The term learning to crawl, walk then run applies to any musical instrument. With only 6 months of playing you have started on a difficult technical piece that intermediate players would find challenging

Click to expand...

I guess my impatience got to me. Because what I do is usually I'll print out the sheets for the music I want to be able to play in the future, then I try them out. By the time I realized it, I could play the introduction quite decently at a slow pace (not including vibratos / more complex 'add-ons'). So I just ended up continuing till I realized, "Hey, I could actually finish this".

I should probably take it back a step or two and start with pieces that incorporate certain technical skills though. Hence I am looking for suggestions on how and what to practice. There's just so much out there.

ubulele said:

Look into the books by Mark Kailana Nelson, Rob McKillop and John King—lots of simpler material here, but of good quality.

Whatever style you intend to learn, I suggest that you pay particular attention to the locations of the roots in all your chord shapes and that you learn a number of generic, movable fretboard patterns to supplement the largely rote approach that most people take. Particularly, learn to derive virtually all your chord shapes from just a handful of template shapes. These patterns are especially useful for chord/melody arranging. One of the better books for such patterns is Ukulele Fretboard Roadmaps. Sadly, a number of the most useful patterns I've yet to see documented (or at least well-discussed) in the tutorial materials and videos I've canvassed.

With chord/melody arranging, you often need to work backwards from the melody notes to the associated chord roots. There are a few tricks that can save you a lot of time—again, ill-documented. After you've got more experience working with simpler material, contact me and I'll try to fill in some of the gaps.

Click to expand...

Thanks!

Yes I'm aware of movable chords and actually am learning based on this at the moment: https://imgur.com/c9FPg



As for chord melody arranging I'm probably not good with my chord progressions yet and music theory. I plan to work on that later but at the moment it's not a priority

Thanks again for the materials suggestions. I'll look them up.

I wasn't expecting so many replies.

Thank you guys for all the recommendations. I'll google them up and take a look at them one by one over the weekend or something.

Looking forward to the day I can be contributing back to the ukulele community.

Ah, thanks! I didn't actually notice it was missing a root on 3rd string.

Welcome Birdiebert,

Great question really. I also learn when Ukulele posts!

Welcome!!!!

Welcome to UU, birdiebert.