Carry On Campanella

A rather pretty style of playing ukulele is campanella (from the Italian for ‘little bell’), a way of picking which allows multiple strings to ring at the same time, creating a harp-like sound.

Jonathan Lewis devotes his site Jon’s Ukulele to campanella fingerstyle ukulele, including some interesting examples of Celtic, medieval, Baroque & folk tunes. He has a number of tutorials on there, including a useful free How To Play Campanella Ukulele guide. Many of his posts and YouTubes include a tab of his arrangement.

Recently he made the following free book available for circulation. It contains ten traditional tunes (some are known by different titles in various regions):

Campanella Ukulele: Ten Morris tunes now available to download for free (or a contribution if you insist). I may expand it at some point in the future but as I’ve been promising to publish the tabs for a long time I decided to release it now.
Here’s the link to Gumroad
Go to my YouTube to hear all of the tunes, there’s a playlist of Morris tunes

1. The Banks of the Dee
2. Brighton Camp
3. Bumpus O’Stretton
4. The Cuckoo’s Nest
5. Galopede
6. Lads a Bunchum
7. The Nutting Girl
8. Old Molly Oxford
9. The Princess Royal
10. Ribbon Dance

Here he is performing Brighton Camp (also known as The Girl I Left Behind Me & Waxie’s Dargle) :

 

PLUCking Ukes – Free Fingerpicking Lessons

Brett McQueen, from the excellent Ukulele Tricks site is offering a free three-week Fingerpicking Tricks Mini Lesson Series to subscribers on his mailing list & PLUC website readers. For any of you that have followed his free videos or enrolled in his Strumming Tricks onine course, you’ll know he’s a very clear & articulate teacher.

 

Chord A Day

Csus4 ukulele chord – 31 Jan (Photo credit: Ukulele Chords)

Fancy learning a new chord every day? Then hop over to Curt Sheller’s All Things Ukulele site.

There are also a number of other useful free resources on there – including lots of lessons covering chords, techniques, learning the fingerboard, strumming, finger-picking, scales, rhythm, ear-training & songs.

Jeanette

 

PLUCking Ukes – Rhythm Without Blues

Over the last few club nights we’ve had discussions about how it’s important to consider the ukulele as both a stringed AND percussion instrument. We’ve talked about varying our strumming patterns to add more interest to songs. And also seen how easy it is to fall into the trap of speeding up when we play!

So I was pleased to find Rhan’s Wilson All In Good Time site. Subtitled Rhythm & Music Explained Simply, Rhan is both a drummer & uke player & has an excellent set of tutorials which urge the reader to be patient & not rush into playing the next song before mastering the basics.

I need a new strum! – Part 1

See also his lessons on: Put some “feel” into your strumming!; How to be a better “strummer” – revised

In addition to his very good strumming technique pointers, he covers finger-picking & playing in a group / performing. Well worth dipping into – or even reading from the beginning, as the older posts give a good grounding in improving your timing & listening skills.

 

PLUC Tales – It’s Been A Year…

Jeanette’s Purple Mahalo Uke

I realised with surprise the other day that I’ve now owned my ukulele for a year!

I’d been going upstairs to a neighbour’s flat, to water his plants & feed his cat over the summer, & found myself coveting his uke, which sat there winking at me along with piles of songs showing chord diagrams. It looked like it would be fun to have a strum.

Knowing it was bad manners to play with someone’s instrument without prior permission, I joked with a friend that, if I could find a cheap uke in my favourite colour, maybe I’d get one & teach myself. Within about thirty seconds on Google I realised that I could indeed purchase a purple Mahalo, reviewed as a good entry level cheap beginners’ ukulele, for £15. There seemed to be masses of on-line resources of tutorials & songs, so the deed was done & it arrived to my work the next day, much to the amusement of my colleagues!

Having dug out my notes from my first steps in learning, I thought some of the info might be useful to other recent beginners:

 

PLUCking Ukes – Travis Finger Picking

As a follow-up to the demo from Chris on Travis finger picking at Tuesday’s club night and the tutorial from Ukulele Mike I emailed round afterwards, here’s Mike Lynch’s video lesson:

For those of you not on our members’ email list, this is Mike’s original Travis picking post.

Jeanette