Becoming a lazy uke player..

Liamfsus7

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So I've recently discovered the magic of transposing..
And I've returned to all the songs I tried and failed to master previously, transposed them to chords and I can play and it's helped me enjoy my uke alot more..
Finally no more E, Bb etc

My issues are that I know this is lazy, and really I ought to learnt to play the correct chords - but I'm hopeless at barring!
And of course anyone who has a good ear can tell I'm playing in the wrong key..

What are people's opinions on transposing? Should I stop before I become to acclimatised to playing the easy common chords?
 
i made a decision not to take easy route, but saying that transposing happens all the time, what i mean by easy route is learn the hard chords, if you keep at hard chords they will come, Bb is easier for me now, what you want to try and do is do some scales to give your fingers a workout,
 
So I've recently discovered the magic of transposing..
And I've returned to all the songs I tried and failed to master previously, transposed them to chords and I can play and it's helped me enjoy my uke alot more..
Finally no more E, Bb etc

My issues are that I know this is lazy, and really I ought to learnt to play the correct chords - but I'm hopeless at barring!
And of course anyone who has a good ear can tell I'm playing in the wrong key..

What are people's opinions on transposing? Should I stop before I become to acclimatised to playing the easy common chords?
Do you sing too? Just tell them that key works best for your voice. :)

Seriously though, depending on what you want to accomplish, I recommend stretching your comfort zone.
 
And of course anyone who has a good ear can tell I'm playing in the wrong key..
Not necessarily. It's very common to change a key to suit your vocal range, like sukie said.

The problem I see is that if you start playing everything in the same key(s) there's a similarity that gets boring after a while.

And of course, you won't progress much as a player if you stick to the same easy chords all the time. Those tougher chords will get easier with time. :cool:
 
It's not really the wrong key if it fits your voice. Also, most people can't tell key from schmee - most of us human beings are much more able to identify relative pitches (i.e. intervals) than we are absolute pitch. Therefore, if the intervals are right (the tonic, the IV, the perfect fifth, etc.) it doesn't much matter what key they are in.

Often switching to a different key makes sense when switching instruments because it may facilitate playing embellishments that would be nearly impossible in the original key on that instrument.

That said, you don't want to neglect learning other chords / keys. If you play everything in C people will begin to notice... :)

John
 
And of course anyone who has a good ear can tell I'm playing in the wrong key...

Anyone with enough experience and/or talent to have a "good ear" will know that there's no such thing as the wrong key. :)

JJ
 
I love the process of transposing a song I want to play. I transpose songs so that it makes it easy for me to sing. Many times that means the key of F so the Bb is a chord I have to play fairly often. I do have to confess that I've transposed songs to avoid having to play an E. I haven't found a song I've been interested in yet that I couldn't sing comfortably without having to play an E so avoiding E hasn't cramped my desires at all so far. On occasion I'll give it a go but I have yet to make an E sound decent.

When I transpose a song, I also put it into a format that I like much more than what you usually find over the internet. I don't like it when the chords are notated above the lyrics. It basically doubles the length of the song and it often makes it difficult to get the whole song on one page. I like to incorporate the chords directly into the line of the lyric using brackets so I know exactly where the chord changes go. With this format, I can get a whole song on one page with chord diagrams on the bottom of the page. Being able to comfortably sing a song makes playing it so much more fun and enjoyable. Transposing opens that door and is an awesome skill to learn.
 
You could always do what I hear Formby did: have several ukes tuned to different keys :). I think he said he could only play in the key of C, but that might be modesty.
 
Playing an instrument is supposed to be fun and enjoyable. If transposing to a different key makes playing fun and enjoyable for you then transpose away!

I've transposed a lot of songs to keys that are easier for me to sing, and the songs do begin to have a "sameness" about them. But you can even break this up by learning to finger pick, learn fillers on the scale, work with different strum patterns, mix strums and finger picking, etc.

The comments about stretching yourself are also wonderful comments. For various reasons I didn't pick up a uke for almost a year. I was working on learning new things at the time, and it's surprising how much I forgot. Keep the learning going.
 
For some songs the chord progressions seem to fit the song better in one key better that another on the uke (unless you like playing half way up the neck). That and also you don't want me to sing Neil Young songs in the key he recorded them in!
 
Go ahead and play everything in C. Have fun, learn different strum techniques to lively up the song, and let that baby fly! Better to play than not.

You will come across songs in other keys or with multiple chords anyway, so you will encounter them in your travels. Today is the only day that matters, but you will hopefully be playing for a long time. Tell that guy in the mirror to cut you some slack.

I sing in the key of Ringo.
 
I don't know much about music theory. Is the key of a song the first note or chord that you play? I'm guessing it's probably not as simple as that. Out of curiosity, I checked out 25 of the songs I've been playing most recently. 12 of them started with C, 8 started in F, 4 started in D and 1 started in G. I transposed all of them so I could sing them comfortably. For me, there's enough variety there that I'm not getting the sense of sameness among all of the songs but I have found that when you're playing a song with a familiar family of chords I sometimes tend to move from chord to chord more instinctively.
 
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