I had never heard of Sammy till Baz's review.
Nobody has heard of everybody, so I'm sure Sammy is fine with that.
It's a big world out there, and even here, where Sammy has been a member for over a year, nobody can see everything! We really do have 140,000 members!
When I first started my ukulele journey a couple of years ago, I was all about the SONGS. After the first couple of hundred obvious ones I found on YT (half of which were Beatles tunes, of course
) I started digging deeper into pop tunes with killer riffs that I thought would be fun to play. I found what a lot of folks here have mentioned, that all too many YT ukulele tutorialists are taking cowboy chord approaches to strumming with all the edges sanded off, and that's fine for a lot of cases...but other songs, if you don't have the riff, there's no point to playing the song at all.
One of those for me is one of the ne plus ultra one-hit wonders, "There She Goes" from Lee Mavers of The Las (although Lee would murder me for calling it and/or him a one-hit wonder LOL). I've since heard some other people get it right, but the first I found was Sammy, who knocked it out of the park.
This was right about the time that Sammy started the cheekily-named Fingerstyle Fursday (an approach he's currently revisiting with Chewsday Chats). These started as etudes, but were actually gorgeous. He wound up doing 70-odd of them in three volumes, and a couple of them wound up serving as the foundation of songs on his fantastic new album, Vejr, which I've raved about here before. Here's one of the first ones I saw (I think #7 was the one that came out the week I subscribed to him), but they're all amazing in their own ways -- occassionally downright hilarious, but all beautiful.
Aside from bunches of fantastic individual videos, my favorite project may have been last year's Chordvember, where he took a deep dive into chords and their extensions up the neck. These are all in shorts at both YT and Instagram, and they absolutely blew me away. They still do! There are plenty of fancy chords, but my favorite starts with a variation of Em on frets 11 and 13. Where these really take off is in chord progressions. Not only are they mostly quite simple -- some of them are even easier than their first position forms! Like this Em, which is only 2 fingers. He then uses the same fingers for variations of C and D to make a progression so beautiful it still brings tears to my eyes a year later.
Now I'll be the first to admit that none of this might be your particular cup of tea, but as I've mentioned before, he really is in my tippy-top tier of performers.
