If you’ve just received your first ukulele, then have a look round our site for playing tips, such as our New Uke For Xmas? article which directs you to some beginners’ guide and handy resources. Or search down the right hand side of the page for the many topics we cover.
Should you wish to buy a uke, check out our recommendations for decent starter instruments in Good Buy To All That….
For those of you wishing to access some online lessons, James Hill’s Booster Uke is free until the end of Jan 2017, which will get you moving up & down the fretboard.
For a bit of a workout, why not try out the Chord Quiz on Ukulele Go or head over to Uke Hunt’s more challenging Ukulele Quiz 2016.
Over the last few weeks, both Chris & Simon have mentioned how useful it can be to play the same song in a number of different keys, to expand your repertoire to learn the full range of chords. It is also a good way to start understanding more about music theory; to see how chords relate to musical keys & begin understanding how transposing works (ie putting tunes in another key).
If you look on several song sites, such as Chordie or Tontonremy & find a song you want to play, there are options on the page to trranspose it, so with a quick press of a button, you can have the song in a new key. Or you can use the PLUC Transposing Tool to work it out manually. Read the rest of this entry »
Two different people asked me about musical keys this week.
A key is a collection of notes in a particular pattern. If you start singing a song on one note & then sing the same song but begin it on a different note, it’s still the same song but is in a different key.You’ll also have to play different chords to make it sound right.
Here are two different versions of The Kinks’ Lola – one on Ukulele Boogaloo & one from Richard G’s Songbook. You’ll notice the difference when you play them – you might find the chords easier to play in one version or that you can sing along better on one. Read the rest of this entry »
The film Made In Dagenham is on BBC2 later tonight, with a cracking Sixties soundtrack accompanying the action. We’ve already featured a uke cover of Sandie Shaw’s (There’s) Always Something There To Remind Me, so here’s paxukulele’s smiley version of The Mindbenders’ hit A Groovy Kind of Love:
Raiding various songbooks & YouTubes for the chords to other tracks from the soundtrack:
Test how well you can identify chords using the Guitarator Chord Quiz. Choose the chords you want to test out (eg major, minor & seventh) and then start the quiz.
As today would have been George Harrison’s seventieth birthday, here’s a video from his final album Brainwashed where he’s ukeing with a few pals on the Harold Arlen & Ted Koehle number Between The Devil & The Deep Blue Sea:
After discussions at recent club nights from Chris & Paul about movable chords & different chord fingerings, here’s another article to help those with little or no music theory background learn about major chords.
