Let’s hope for a safe, healthy & happy new year. Here’s a free PLUC Circle of Fifths 2022 Calendar.
PDF version:
Word version:
Why not print it out & mark every day you practice your ukulele? Read more about the Circle of Fifths and how it can help your playing.
When you are busy it can be good to find more effective ways of using your practice time. Fiona Berry from Learn Music Together runs two Facebook groups called Music Lessons & Practice: Learning & Understanding and Musician in the Making where she shares daily tips, ideas and videos from her experience as a music teacher, to help people improve their skills. In addition to answering questions in the groups, she also runs workshops & gives individual tuition sessions.
For example, when making mistakes many people either just ignore them & keep playing, or start a song again from the start. Instead, you should stop, examine where you’ve gone wrong & play that part through slowly several times until you can reliably play it correctly, working up to the correct speed for the song. Subsequently, when playing the piece you should return to the places that give you difficulty and play them a few times first, before going back to play the tune in full. This means you rehearse the tricky sections more frequently and it will become easier to play the entire song accurately & smoothly.
You can download Fiona’s free Practice Tips Guide with ten useful ideas to try out.
Written to suit any instrument, it’s particularly good if you are venturing into playing chord melody, as she gives several examples using sheet music, which would aid you to focus on the detail efficiently. But the suggestions also work well with songsheets or tab, as you can take small portions of a verse, chorus, riff or solo section and work on those individually where you are having issues with chord changes, rhythm or singing a melody.
PLUC – Circle of Fifths – Whole Wheel
Christopher Davis-Shannon, aka the Tinman, has a website with playalongs of old-time tunes as well as various tutorials and Uke Minutes with different tips and techniques, including singing whilst playing, practice exercises, strumming methods, picking patterns, chord melody, using a metronome and showboating tricks:.
His latest YouTube series 12 Keys In 12 Weeks (#12Keys12weeks) gets you playing a different scale each week. He provides a number of exercises, including a little melody up the scale for each one using broken – arpeggiated – chords that ‘fit’ within that key by containing just notes from that specific scale (known as a chord family).
In the first video, below, he is demonstrating C major – check the original YouTube page for links in the description for his free worksheets (and more detailed lessons on scales and chords within them). As he progresses, he’s starting to add in different chord voicings to get you to follow the melody notes and play further up the neck. By the end of the series you should be more confident at playing in any key.
Should you want to understand a little more how he arrives at the chords for each scale, have a quick look at a Circle of Fifths.
If you’re playing in the key of C major, take all the chords nearest C on the wheel in a little ‘L’ shape. These chords are made up from the same notes that you’ll find in that specific scale. Go through the letters alphabetically from C right round to C again to get the whole scale.
PLUC – Circle of Fifths – C Major Chord Family
When playing chords in this key, the letters on the outside are major chords, the ones on the inside are minor ones and the one out on the leg of the ‘L’ is a diminished chord (dim7 or sometimes written as °):
C major – D minor – E minor – F major – G major – A minor – B dim – C major
PLUC – Circle of Fifths – G Major Chord Family
For G major, you’ll get: G major – A minor – B minor – C major – D major – E minor – F# dim – G major
PLUC – Circle of Fifths – D Major Chord Family
For D major, you’ll get: D major – E minor – F# minor – G major – A major – B minor – C# dim – D major
And so on, round the wheel in the same way for each different key.
See more of our posts covering improving your chord playing; musical keys, the PLUC Transposing Tool and other PLUC Weekend Workouts. Original Circle of Fifths diagram from Wikipedia’s public domain images.
Here’s Christopher, with the first video in the series – C major:
Here are some practical tips from Gail, who is always busy travelling around from her home in Colchester (where she plays in a U3A class and also in a group Ukulele for Fun, who do little gigs, mostly for old people’s homes) and her family, looking after her young grandchildren in Catford & elsewhere. So she is used to carrying round all her equipment effectively between locations and playing under different conditions! She’s also an avid crafter, doing knitting and other hobbies, and makes use of equipment she has from those activities to create some cheap and functional items for her uke-playing.
Gail’s Essential Equipment – Nappy Carrying Bag, Clipboard, Handy Notes, Ring Binders, Book Stand
Happy 2017!
Sheila’s 50th – PLUC
Top Referring Sites 2014
Our free downloadable PLUC 2015 Calendar shows the movable major chord shapes for year-round reference, in a handy diagram from UkeGeeks.com. Thanks to Buz for kindly tweaking the layout for us! (He also runs PizzaByTheSlice, which contains many uke-related designs & is well worth a look.) Read the rest of this entry »
People of Lewisham's Ukulele Club 