- This topic has 67 replies, 34 voices, and was last updated 3 minutes ago by
.
-
Posts
-
@the_bumble_bard Hey friend 🙂 nice to hear from you. Wow you’re submission is going to be wonderful. You are so creative. Yes this is a classic song of Aldrine’s and Ukulele Underground. Ernie Cruz is the original singer of the song. I didn’t know they won a third time for their podcast 🙂 Boy do I miss those Friday night jams and the podcast. It was so much fun.
@Andrew no more feedback? 😳 That’s a major part of the subscription. Is the platform changing its goals?The slow movement (aka largo) of Vivaldi’s winter concerto has always been one of my favorite pieces of classical music, and coincidentally I stumbled across a nice ukulele arrangement a couple of weeks ago which I already started learning. So I’ll make that the subject of my January challenge. What’s fascinating about this piece of music is that it’s made up using the very simplest of ingredients. It’s a basic major 1-4-5 progression, a straightforward steady rhythm, and the melody spans less than an octave. Yet when you listen to it, it sounds like the prettiest thing you’ve ever heard. But I guess with the great masters of classical music it’s the same as with great chefs: all they need is a few simple ingredients to create a masterpiece.
The challenge with playing something like this is to make every note count and bring out all the beauty. I will particularly focus on the legato playing to really make the melody sing. And one challenge I noticed in this particular arrangement is that there are a few melodic runs played on the high g string, with notes on the e or a string played as harmonic accompaniment. For some reason I have a hard time bringing out the notes on the high g string, they always sound softer than the notes on the other strings and tend to be covered up. So whenever the melody is played on the high g string, I have to make a conscious effort to pluck it a little harder than usual, and pluck the other string a little softer. I found this really challenging in my first practice attempts.So to sum it up:
Execution: learn to play a moderately challenging ukulele arrangement with a specific focus on feel. Practice the emphasis of melody notes played on different strings, particularly the high g string.
Application: apply these techniques by learning and playing the arrangement of the slow movement of Vivaldi’s winter concerto.
Execution: I will practice this song every day with a special focus on these areas and will post the result when I reached a point at which further progress becomes slow.
Happy new year everyone !
I usually go all out with planning at new year. This time, I’ll try the other way around and keep it minimal. My goal is just to go for consistency and to pick up the ukulele every day. That’s it 🙂
1) Execution: pick up the ukulele everyday
2) Application: Learn the Aerial arrangement
3) Evaluation: so far, 2 out of 2 days this year 🙂@misterbones, that’s so, so neat! I can’t wait to hear that. That’s also one of my favorite pieces of classical music. The funny thing is, Matt Dahlberg is creating an arrangement of that same exact section, Vivaldi’s Winter (Largo), for a lesson on his Patreon, but he posts the lesson publicly usually – so you could see that, too. I’m really looking forward to that, but also to hearing your rendition! That’s what I love so much about classical music, too, is the subtle feeling you can convey with fewer “ingredients” at times. 🙂
@frederic, love that goal! So straightforward, but beautiful. 🙂
@gi_gi_ thank you so much, friend, good to hear from you, too! We need to catch up via email because there are some things we need to discuss, LOL!! 😉 I’m really looking forward to your tune, too. Ah, I know, I really miss those shows, too, so sad they’re gone now. It was pretty amazing that Aldrine sang a couple of songs I picked, including a Backstreet Boys song, I Want It That Way, lol. It was so stinkin’ good, too! Maybe one day they’ll return – how are they going to win for a fourth year, if not?! 😉Hi all and Happy New Year!
I had to think about the details a bit, but really I want to work on my finger picking so here it goes:
1) Execution – I want to work on finger picking, specifically getting away from just using my thumb for all finger picking (so far I’ve let myself be a little lazy with this).
2) Application – I thought about this a lot last month because I wanted to play Away in a Manger but didn’t discipline myself to move away from thumb picking and then I came across that course on Fingerpicking Concepts, which seems like a great place to start. I’ll work through some of those lessons and pick a song by next week to focus on for the month… there is a section of Zombie by the Cranberries I can kinda stumble through thumb picking, but it feels a bit too advanced for me just yet. (But future me will enjoy it!)
3) Evaluation – I will record practices with my song each week to see how I’m progressing with expanding beyond my thumb picking and plan to share back one each week that I’m not entirely mortified with.
Cheers,
Caryn@Andrew That’s fair. Thanks for always be available.
@the_bumble_bard Oh my goodness. I remember Aldrine picking your song. That was fun 🙂 I was asking for things like Purple Rain and he said it would get a copyright strike or something like that 🙂 lol At least there’s still direct access to Aldrine on Mondays still.And Happy New Year to all of you wonderful people!
I wasn’t ready to prepare my own tune for the previous free challenges, so decided this is the time to do it.
Application: Choose a tune from the several little snippets I’ve recorded when something has come to me; decide which key is best for ukulele.
Execution: Develop a song from that tune; add chords and fingerstyle picking to go with it; note it all down on paper; work to bring it up to speed.
Evaluation: Record myself playing it every Friday until I’m ready to submit it on the forum.
Thanks, Andrew, for all you’ve done for the group.
Happy New Year Uke Friends 😀 Execution: my goal this month is to play the “3 levels of walking bass for low g Uke” (a piece I learned a few years ago) on my Ubass. Application: this challenge will involve transposing the piece to work with the bass’s tuning which for me will be good practice reading notation and ear training. Evaluation: after mastering the piece I’ll post a performance here on the forum.
@otzepeng, I missed your comment earlier, apologies! Thank you for that! For me, it is pretty ambitious, and I am also terrible at writing down music, but I think I have made improvements for sure. Over the course of being here, I’ve had about 9 lessons from Matt who helped me start to write down the arr.’s I came up with by ear – he taught me basically from square one how to write down tabs, then eventually I started using Guitar Pro. I think the only thing that makes it possible for me to use that is that it flags the measure “red” if you mess up the rhythm; so then you can “troubleshoot” to figure out how to fix it. Without that, I’d be much more lost, for sure. There were still multiple instances where I wrote something down and showed Matt and he helped me fix it (because it still wasn’t right somehow, even with that “cheat” in Guitar Pro, lol). Andrew has also helped me with some things on this vein. It also has helped a lot that I grew up playing piano, reading sheet music, and learned so much from learning the uke songs here and reading Andrew’s feedback. Looking forward to your tune this month! 🙂
That said, I already got the tabs done somehow! :O I found the sheet music that I learned as a child (since that song is pretty ubiquitous) and that helped me SO MUCH with the rhythm; guess Matt was right about that, as well, cough, whoops. 😂 That does help a lot to look at the rhythm of the original tune, instead of just guessing like I like to do, especially with a more complicated song like this.
I realized something QUITE interesting about this uke arr. though. So, what I figured out on uke I was just playing by ear from memory – from how I remembered the song going on piano, and I was quite delighted how accurate it turned out to be, even in the right key of Ab major (four flats)! But the interesting thing was, I misremembered the order of the music. I played up until maybe the eighth measure, then skipped WAAAAAAAAAAY further along into the song, closer to the end, when the main theme of the song is reprised in a different style – which I loved. I kind of love this version, though; it’s like its own thing now. That said, I may want to try going back and recreating this with the rest of the tune, but that’ll take a while to do. I also will relearn this whole tune on piano because I used to know this entire movement of the song. Hashtag, 2026 goals. 😉
This video is of the OG piano version. In my ukulele version, I play up until 0:32, SKIP a huge section, then pick up playing again at 3:20 and stop after that theme is done.
I also attached the tabs I finished to this post (hopefully, lol)!
@gi_gi_ hahahaha!! Oh my word, Aldrine was really somethin’ else about whose songs he would choose for those AFJ. 😂 Half the time, he would disregard everyone’s suggestions and just do whatever he wanted. What a goof. That’s really fun that you still get to see him on Mondays! I hope he’s doing well. I also miss the fun of those shows. 🙂EDIT: Nope, the sheet music is indeed screwed up, but it’s some sort of formatting issue! The tabs are displaying correctly, but the sheet music is a wonky bunch of squares. Then, I almost accidentally downloaded a virus to try to get the JPG version. I’m off to a flying start this year. 😂😭
Okay, I managed to manually splice together this tab into a JPEG by taking screenshots in GuitarPro, then editing them together in MS Paint. Not ideal whatsoever, but it did seem to work! So, here is the current copy of the tabs / sheet music for Pathétique:
Edit: I managed to mess it up one last time because I realized the exact last note of the song was wrong, so I had to re-screen-shot, re-edit, re-save, etc. But it’s finally done!
Happy New Year to ALL!
I have been very interested in Bluegrass lately and thus searched in that genre, I was tempted to revisit (and hopefully Improve) one of the tunes I’ve already done, but decided to go with Whiskey Before Breakfast.
1. Execution: Learn to play Whiskey Before Breakfast at full tempp and as relaxed as possible. I’ll probably learn both parts but have found it too frustrating to try to sync 2 recordings successfully. That may be a goal for another time. . .
2. Application: Complete the song lesson in the first week. Continue to practice at least 10 minutes/day. Play with backing track at 50% the first week, 75% the following week, then 100% for remainder of the time to polish it for a final recording.
3) Evaluation: Post recording by the end of the month with a focus on clean rhythms, sustain, and a relaxed feel. I hope to be able to keep in time with the recorded backing.
Good luck to all with your goals!
KarenHi All!
This is my first post/challenge, although I’ve been eyeing this website’s content and community for the last year. I’ve decided to hone in on chord-melody style playing and I love that this site predominantly focuses on that, emphasizes technical development, and that there is a variety of classical pieces in the library.
Here are my January goals:
1. Execution – My main focus will be developing slide, hammer-on, and pull-off technique. I received some custom felt uke picks for Xmas (yes, I know uke picks are sacrilegious to some) that I will use for the song. This will also force me to memorize a chord-melody arrangement. Although I love chord-melody style the most, I tend not to learn the songs because the memorization component is hefty.
2. Application – An arrangement of the Pink Panther theme.
3. Evaluation – These will be my focuses every week.
Week 1: Slides
Week 2: Hammer-ons & Pull-offs
Week 3: Rhythm and timing
Week 4: Performance
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.