Phil Doleman, familiar to many as a mainstay of nearly every uke festival, has been busy during lockdown recording a pile of new tutorial videos.
In addition to his playlists of handy Two Minute Tips and growing selection of Ukulele Lessons, there are now a number of Intros, Vamps & Endings videos. There is a pile of free resources to accompany these on his website, along with his clearly-written books, CDs and Patreon pages, all especially useful while you can’t catch him performing or teaching in person.
The mini workshop here shows you how to play all over the ukulele neck with just four shapes. Phil explains how to use this knowledge to be able to create a couple of hundred different chords! As always, he’s very practical and describes how to incorporate these into your regular playing, rather than just trying to learn everything he’s told you by rote – which isn’t the way to learn musically:
Tyler at Ten Thumbs Productions is doing a Ten Day Blues Challenge in October, releasing ten different blues tutorials on various techniques & topics, including PDFs of each lesson. The crash course aims to take you from beginners’ blues to intermediate level, basic shuffles to soloing and pull-offs to pentatonics. Even if you already play a little blues, there’s bound to be something for you to learn with him.
Complete all ten challenges any time during October – as explained by him in his video – & optionally enter the draw to win a ukulele. It’s free and open to everyone.
(Winner will be picked on 1 Nov, based on effort rather than skill.)
How much attention do you pay to the different styles and genres of music when you are listening to tunes? Can you identify what’s jazz or soul? Do you know your arias from your Elbow?
This week’s fun quiz from Musical-U has fourteen short clips for you to match up with the descriptions of various genres ranging from alternative to world, blues to rap & country to ska. Bonus points if you can also identify the artists!
Tamás Gáll has just developed a new chord training site called It’s Chordtime, which allows you to change chords to a regular metronome tempo and help become a smoother player.Read the rest of this entry »
Chris has found this interesting lecture from the basic Listening To Music course by Yale University and feels it would repay many members of our group for the time spent watching it.
It opens with a preamble about musical notation & the reasons we use it (also mentioned in last month’s PLUC Weekend Workout & other music theory postings if you need more detail). Then the majority of Prof Craig Wright’s talk covers rhythm in many music styles, showing how different time signatures sound & getting students to listen to various pieces of music so they can conduct along to the beat. Read the rest of this entry »
People learn ukulele & music theory differently, so I was interested to find the Rainbow Music site, which offers free on-line music lessons, basing learning round colour-coded musical notes.
Although you need to register to access the members’ area, once you’ve done so there is plenty to see & practice without needing to buy their paid-for resources: Read the rest of this entry »
Reading Music Mnemonics – Treble Clef from http://cars.blurtit.com/ Notes on the lines are E – G – B – D – F = Every Good Boy Deserves Football Notes in the spaces spell F – A – C – E
Another interesting learning resource site I found this week is memrise. Its main section is on-line language courses, with novel ways of getting you to learn the vocabulary (along with mnemonics, submitted by fellow learners, which may or may not seem useful to you!) but it covers a lot more under Other Topics..
It’s a free sign-up. You do short, timed tests to build your knowledge & can return as often or infrequently as you wish to practice. There is a reasonable Musical Notation section with all manner of items to help your music theory knowledge, such as:
People of Lewisham's Ukulele Club 