Hi from the UK!

[ripley]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been lurking on the site for a month or so and thought it was time to say ‘Hi’.
I’ve been playing for about 4 months, after being inspired by seeing Twenty One Pilots in Birmingham.
I started with Bernadette and also see a ukulele-teaching-friend once every few weeks.
I arrived at this site after seeing the Jurassic Park tutorial on Youtube. My son is a huge JP fan so I had to learn to play the song for him 🙂 He’s working on it now too, which is great as I haven’t previously been able to tempt him into playing an instrument.
I’ve just got back from a week at a (small) festival where there was a ukulele workshop and on the last day I, along with several other participants, performed six songs they had written about climate change, which was a brilliant experience.
I’ve been getting on pretty well with strumming songs but I don’t want to plateau and Rock Class 101 seems to have an excellent range of courses and songs to enable me to to push myself as I continue my ukulele journey.
I look forward to learning with you all 🙂

[Andrew]

Welcome, Ripley! Very cool to see you stared with Berny, she rocks 🙂

I hope you 2 join us for this month’s challenge as JP is one of the choices.

[ripley]

Thanks Andrew 🙂

I have recorded a JP submission, I’m just deciding whether I should make another attempt to iron out the (many!) wrinkles before posting 😀

[becky7777]

Hey ripley!

I do my best on recording day, but I personally try to keep it down to “If I can’t get my best in an hour, I take the best out of what I recorded in that hour.” It makes me unhappy a lot if I’m playing bad that day, but I had to draw a line lol.

The festival you took part in sounds like it was a blast! Congratulations on finding a song to tempt your son into an instrument too! Maybe he will find he loves uke, or playing music in general. 😁

[ripley]

Hi Becky,

That’s really good advice, thank you! The pressure of trying to do well for the camera, even though I can repeat as many times as I like, definitely doesn’t help to bring out my best performance!
When I started out and I’d learned to sing and and strum fairly reliably I tried to record myself playing the theme from The Detectorists by Johnny Flynn (a very simplified version!). I must have made about twenty attempts before giving up. Of course, the more it goes wrong, the greater the frustration which doesn’t improve the result!

The festival was really good fun. Playing was very low pressure as there was a group of us taking part so any dodgy chords got lost in the overall sound 🙂

I’m hoping that my son will continue with the uke once he’s mastered JP. He does prefer instrumental music. Maybe I can get him working on the Stranger Things piece next as we’re all watching S3 at the moment. My daughter also picks the uke up occasionally as she loves singing although her priority is getting one that she can custom-paint lol!

I have a question about the challenge submissions – I notice that in some posts members have added the phrase “I am a premium member”. Is there a reason/need to do that?

[robinboyd]

Hi Ripley – If you are a premium member (i.e. a paying member) you get an extra entry in the challenge. We need to say that we are premium members, though, in order to save Andrew the trouble of looking up everyone’s membership status.

[ripley]

Ah! Thanks for explaining Robin 🙂

[Author]

Posts