Beginner ukulele lessons from my local arts centre.

If you are in contact with them, could you pass on a bit of feedback for me? In the Riptide video, they say "in music, there are 4 beats per bar" or something to that effect. Now, I know that they know that that's incorrect and they are just trying to make things easy to understand for beginners, but I would have known that to be patently false even when I first started playing the uke, and it would have really turned me off. They could have said "this song has 4 beats per bar" instead and avoided this problem. Anyway, it's something to think about in case any other viewers are as pedantic as I am.
 
Cool that they are doing this. Good luck.

My two cents is that using an all black ukulele where you cannot see the fret markers, fingering, etc. is not the best choice.
 
If you are in contact with them, could you pass on a bit of feedback for me? In the Riptide video, they say "in music, there are 4 beats per bar" or something to that effect. Now, I know that they know that that's incorrect and they are just trying to make things easy to understand for beginners, but I would have known that to be patently false even when I first started playing the uke, and it would have really turned me off. They could have said "this song has 4 beats per bar" instead and avoided this problem. Anyway, it's something to think about in case any other viewers are as pedantic as I am.

There you go again, Robin, getting all pedantic... Hahahahahaha! Just kidding, Robin! First of all, your point was gently put forth and well-taken; secondly, I just turned 66 and I never bothered to find out what "pedantic" means... until now !! So, thank you !!
 
My initial thought was the strum pattern is quite difficult for a raw beginner, but then I recalled how I found learning d-du-udu not too difficult back in the day, so it's probably just my ingrained preference for other patterns now that makes this one difficult.
 
In the UK we have had severe austerity measures imposed upon all local Councils by successive Governments as a direct result of the cavalier financial attitudes that radiated from the USA and these then insinuated every financial institution and public accountable body. What I mean by these is the financial mismanagement that lead up to the 2008 crisis.

The result is we in the UK have Councils that have insufficient funds to properly manage public services, remember in the US when New York was broke, well all our Councils are in that boat.

So rather then be pedantic and criticise, Wiltshire should be applauded for trying to provide a public service which is probably on a shoestring budget if in fact it has any budget other than taking up a bit of the Councils online resource.

Hats off to Wiltshire.
 
Definitely, hats off to Wiltshire! Mr. Edwards' video presentations are really good and will surely help many folks gain a good fundamental understanding of "what the ukulele is all about". And I recall how, many years ago, someone was kind enough to sit down with me and patiently show me these very same things, which led to a lifetime of ukulele and guitar playing, continuing still to this day! Also, I wish I had Mr. Edwards' hair! Actually, I wish I had ANY hair! Finally, and please accept this in the constructive spirit in which it is intended, I noticed that when Mr. Edwards refers to the various strings by number ("first string", "fourth string", etc.), he is making those references in the reverse order from what I'm accustomed to. For instance, he refers to the G string as the first string, whereas I would refer to it as the fourth string. This isn't a life-or-death issue, of course, but I'm a little concerned that when we install a new set of strings (Martins, for instance), there could be confusion due to the fact that the individual string envelopes make reference to these numbers using the G string as "fourth", the C string as "third", the E string as "second", and the A string as "first".
 
Looks really good Jim. Well done Wiltshire for putting these on. I don’t think it’s a big issue when he says there are four beats in a bar if this video, as it seems to be, is aimed at complete novices. Ok he could have said, for this song we’re doing now, there are four beats in the bar, but I think that’s a minor thing. I think Robin’s observation is fair enough though, and he even seems to poke fun at his own pedantry at the end. Plus he lives at the other end of the world and may not know about austerity and it’s effects on services. Why should he?
 
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