PLUC Weekend Workout

Musical-U Genre Quiz

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!

More Musical-U articles & podcasts

More PLUC Weekend Workouts

 

Sing Along A Max

At this week’s session we were talking about people being shy of singing, ways to gain confidence & improve volume.

I’ve put some singing guides from different sites in the Instructional folder of the PLUC Box to help folk start doing some gentle practice at home, get more used to the sound of their own voice and be able to both sing & play the uke at the same time.

We’ve previously shown examples of uke groups with a great ethos of getting all their members to sing along together and of my experiences participating in the Southbank’s Chorus Festivals in 2013 & 2014, which was brilliant fun once I got over my initial trepidation at singing with groups of total strangers! It’s always good to challenge yourself & try something different or you never gain new skills.

There are a number of YouTubes out there which show you how to assess your vocal range. This one from Playback.fm is fun, as it matches your range with different singers. Once you’ve watched the video, put in your result & it will give you your ‘vocal twin’!

 

PLUC Weekend Workout

There are a growing number of podcasts out there, including some specific to ukuleles and others covering all types of music theory.  The twice-weekly Musicality Podcast (brought to you by the people who run the Musical-U community music training website) is having a Beatles Month for April.

Through a series of interviews they will be talking to different people and analysing how & why the songs worked;  the relationship between music & lyrics; production techniques; how a tribute act goes about reproducing those Beatles sounds and much more.

On the practical side, people are asked to remind themselves of the active listening techniques covered in a previous podcast – which is a great way of encouraging you to pay more attention to the music around you each day and put your musician skills to use in actually noting the instruments being played in a tune, song structures, rhythms, chord progressions etc – and pick three Beatles songs to consider in detail. There will be a live chat session later in the month.

Another exercise suggested on the forums are to make yourself a song interval chart (ie a way to help you recognise the gaps between two notes) consisting purely of Beatle numbers.

Linking nicely with this is Cynthia Lin’s annual Beatles Uke Jam. For 2019, it’s on Sun 14 April and streamed live so folk can join in worldwide. Get the 2019 songbook for free (or make a donation); play along with a recording of the 2018 Livestream & watch some of Cynthia’s lessons on the Fab Four and others.