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I AM A PREMIUM MEMBER
While I usually like to pick the most challenging arrangement to learn for the monthly challenges, I deviated from that rule this time and learned the arrangement that was musically the most appealing to me, which was by far My Favorite Things. For the same reason Andrew mentioned, I just love those unique chord voicings Christopher came up with. Especially the many open voicings give it a very special, almost ethereal sound.
BTW, for thirteen minutes and forty six seconds of pure bliss, please check out the epic John Coltrane version of this tune on youtue.I am a premium member, and I tackled the Motown medley this month. Disclaimer: I started working on it right when it came out, so I had a head start 🙂 Super fun to play along with the backing track, and also very much needed practice for me to learn how to listen to other instruments while playing and trying to stay in sync with them, something I don’t get to do often enough. This was also my very first attempt at recording my playing seperately and mixing it together with the backing track on the computer, so I developed my tech skills as well 🙂
Due to the length of the arrangement I just did a couple of takes instead of trying to shoot for perfection, so there are some rough spots, especially in the last song, I’m not really happy with that yet. I’ll keep practicing it, but it will have to do for this month’s challenge.
Thanks to Evan for the arrangement, to Andrew for the great tutorial and to the band for the backing track. This is the good stuff.Thanks guys!
@rebeca: As all things, that too comes with practice. Jazz is my favorite musical style, so most of the ukulele pieces I learn outside of the rockclass101 challenges are arrangements of jazz standards. And while some of these chord shapes are challenging, the nice thing is that there are just a few of them, and they repeat all over again in pretty much every jazz standard. One of the first pieces I learned was Sweet Sue, Just You from the James Hill book Duets for One, and that one song contains pretty much all of the basic jazz chord shapes. After I had that one down, everything after that was so much easier, since it’s the same shapes all over again, just in different sequences and positions.@rickey: Thanks so much for posting the original! I was tempted to post it myself, but I didn’t want to spam you guys. But if you’ve got just two minutes to spare, don’t liste to my version, please listen to the Les Paul & Mary Ford original. That recording is such a treasure! I can’t stop being amazed all over again by the sheer amount of creativity and innovation packed into these two minutes of magic. In terms of guitar and vocal playing and recording technique, this is not years, it is decades ahead of its time. Can’t believe this was recorded back in 1951. Also, I would recommend to check out the youtube video “playing like Les Paul ain’t no joke” by Guitar Pilgrim, where he breaks down the guitar techniques in this exact video. Very relevating. Finally, check out the video “Mary Ford & Les Paul Absolutley live.” You’ll see that Mary Ford was not just a great singer, but also a bad-ass guitar player. And the ending is just hysterical.
@rebeca yes, but I’ve also been practicing my a.. off over the course of the last year… Anyway, one thing I noticed in your recording is the right hand position, which is closer to the neck for a much sweeter sound. And this time I can’t blame the Uke for the sound difference 😉 I never paid much attention to my right hand position, but definitely will going forward.
@rebeca: pure magic. It doesn’t get any better than that. If that’s how you play after a one year hiatus and with little practice, I have to admit I’m jealous 😉
I AM A PREMIUM MEMBER
Blue Moon – with a little bit of goofing around during the outro in honor of this month’s theme – just couldn’t resist 🙂
I’d like to add that even if it’s not possible or too complicated to add an option to switch between alphabetical order and posting date in the song list, it might be worth considering to change the default (and only available) sort order from alphabetical to posting date, always showing the newest song lessons at the top of the page. I would highly prefer that order, and I can imagine a majority of the users might do as well.
This is actually something I’ve also been looking for, and while the current solution (navigating to a specifc song lesson in order to see the list of the five most recent song lessons) does work, it’s not as intuitive and user friendly as it could be and might be worth being considered as optimization area when the next opportunity for a remake comes up.
My particular suggestion: when navigating to the Ukulele Songs area, by default i see the list of all songs (currently 293) in alphabetical order, spread across 20 pages.
A simple setting that would allow me to change the order from aphabetical to posting date (newest to oldest) would be ideal.
Another setting that would allow me to see all entries on one long page instead of across 20 pages would be even better yet. That would also allow me to use the standard browser search functionality and would be a great addition to the very useful filter and search area on the right.I picked the Pineapple Uke Blues this month, but my main challenge was that I didn’t get around to actually start learning it until last Saturday, so I had five days to get it from zero to a somewhat submittable state. I cut some corners mainly by omitting all the plucking vs. strumming subtleties and just strumming the whole thing. Here it is.
I picked DayDreaming for the August challenge. And since one of my ongoing issues in many of the previous challenges has been that I tend to play too fast, I specifically challenged myself this time to come up with a rendition that is as laid-back and relaxed as humanly possible for me. So this is a fair deal slower than Andrew’s original version, and believe me, doing that was much harder for me than meeting or exceeding the original tempo. It’s interesting how the character of the piece changes by just slowing down the tempo.
My version sounds almost like a lullaby, which is not too bad of a fit given the title.Ok, now that I’m done early with the August challenge, I’m going to head right into learning the Motown medely. That’s going to be tons of fun, and I’m sure it’s going to pop up in one of these challenges in a not too distant future 🙂
I love surf rock and really like the wipe out arrangement, so that was my pick this month. I had very little practice time due to vacation the last few weeks, thus the late and yet unpolished submission. But I guess surf rock is suppposed to sound a little under-rehearsed 🙂 For the same reason I didn’t bother to learn or even memorize the ending lick, so I just winged it on the spot.
