Greetings from a little village in the South of France

AtSunrise

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In the hills, France
Hello!
I’ve just recently joined Ukulele Underground and want to wish everyone, ‘bonne continuation’ as they say over here.

I ‘started’ when I was about thirty and I’m now sixty, playing guitar, a bit of diatonic accordion, ukulele, ukulele bass tuned in fifths, and Octave mandolin/mandolin. So I’m a sort of guitar and fifths kind of guy.

I took a one year, two hours a week, singing course about eighteen years ago -which I’d recommend 100% to anyone who is a human being. (I’m surprised that doctors don’t often prescribe singing/relaxation as a medication) I know lots of ukulele groups do singing courses on the side.

Self taught, almost all of the time I’ve played either on my own or with my daughter who’s now fifteen. I used YouTube a lot, and posted teaching vids as pay back/sharing, for mandolin.

I got into ukulele mainly for social reasons. I like that it’s a very inclusive instrument with lots of different people who can all play together. What first drew me to the ukulele was when I went through some of the ukulele repertoire PDFs that kind people have shared on the internet. I was surprised to see so many fun songs that I’d overlooked in my youth which was more Led Zeppelin, Yes, Genesis etc.

I recently bought the ukulele bass which I immediately tuned in fifths. I loved that I could pick up a brand new instrument and play some fast Irish tunes straight away, and also be able to play melodies of popular songs by ear in any key.
Most ukulele groups are either looking for a bass player or training their own ones, so that’s nice too, and I spent part of the summer back in England playing bass for a group in Ramsey, Cambs which was a lot of fun.

Another plus about playing the ‘ukulele’ bass in fifths is that there are literally tens of thousands of tabs (real tab) of tunes out there Irish, Old English, OldTime, Bluegrass, Italian, Russian, Caribbean, South American etc for mandolin and fiddle which have the same fretboard layout. So you can read these and play it on a retuned uke.
It’s a more melodic way of playing with riffs too, and can sound great when harmonised by ukuleles playing chords.

-now I’m wondering if someone knows of a program that’s like http://www.mandolintab.net/abcconverter.php

It’s able to convert .abc files, which are simple text files that a lot of traditional folk tune libraries (for example https://www.village-music-project.org.uk/ ) are written and shared in, into mandolin tab.
If there was a ukulele tab print out that would be incredibly cool!

Anyway, I’ve already written a lot, thanks to all of you for the site and for all of your happy, optimistic posts,
Peace and love, Simon
 
Last edited:
And greetings to you, Simon, from a little village in the midlands of England.

John Colter
 
Welcome, welcome and welcome.
 
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