PLUC – February Valentine’s Challenge

Do you love playing your ukulele? If so, why not join in our February Uke Challenge to see where you are with your playing & where you can improve…

Make This Pizza By The Slice Ukulele Heart Box

As many of of our new PLUC members have only been playing during lockdown, we thought they might find it hard to measure their playing progress. Even the more seasoned players amongst them could find something new to learn or refresh an old skill after spending time in the pandemic largely practicing alone.

To give a bit of variety and motivation, we suggested that they try the following challenges. If you fancy joining in, do let us know how you get on in the comments below:

1) How many chords do you know? Look at our UkeAbility article – you might be pleasantly surprised once you’ve measured it. It could open up a lot more songs for you to play. Or highlight where you could practice new areas, such as perfecting your bar chords or choosing moveable ones to make your playing sound more interesting.

2) Check your rhythm is steady. It’s easy to lose focus when playing solo. Can you play a full song at an even tempo, without slowing down in the tricky bits or speeding up where it’s easier? Can you sing and play at the same time? Watch Cathy Fink’s metronome tips demo. Now pick a tune you’re currently working on. How slowly can you play it accurately using this method? How fast can you play it accurately using this method? How much can you improve the tempo over a couple of practice sessions – what range do you now have? What do you notice about the difference / difficulties of playing at each extreme? Do you need to relax any tension build-up afterwards?

3) Are you progressing in your playing and learning new songs effectively? Fiona Barry’s free practice tips guide may give you new ideas to try out to reduce the mistakes you make.  If you like to log your own progress, Stu Fuchs has a free practice diary you can use to track things over the year.  What tips work best for you? And what are you concentrating on for the next month – warm-ups, techniques, songs, lessons / strumalongs etc?

We look forward to hearing your ‘scores’ & feedback. We’re interested to learn how far you’ve got during lockdown, what you’re currently doing musically & what you plan to work on over the next few months.

All the best, stay safe & happy strumming.

Jeanette

 

Fingerpicking Good

As this seems to be the month for challenge series, here’s the latest offering of a free fifteen day fingerstyle course from Terry Carter of Uke Like The Pros. It starts on 1 Nov.

Terry’s lessons are always clearly-presented and informative. He’s been running a number of monthly song challenges on the ULTP forum over the summer, ranging from old standards & pop hits to instrumentals, with prizes such as ukuleles for the best entries. This looks set to be the most thorough, taking people from beginner stage & upwards – covering good technique for finger-picking; introducing seven different picking patterns on alternate days, followed up with seven original pieces to play the next day using the pattern just introduced; including sheet music, tab and backing tracks. At the end of the process there will be a live interactive webinar with extra content.

Further details are in his introductory video. You can sign up here to receive daily updates during the challenge period.

Here’s Terry playing one of his original works, Fingerstyle Meditatio For Ukulele In A Minor, which is the type of piece he will be demonstrating on his course: