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Congrats on your achievements and all the best for your next year with the ukulele lisadmh!
This year I participated in the 100 Days of Ukulele project for the first time. I didn’t know what I was getting into, but it changed quite a lot for me. I started recording myself regularly and published more than 100 videos of my practice, playing and even some play along videos with onscreen tabs.
I learned many new songs, some of which were and still are very challenging for me, mostly chord melody arrangements. I got out of my comfort zone and feel like I’ve made quite a bit of progress.
Moreover, I learned what I want and need to work on more. Here are some of those things:
1. Staying focused and relaxed while playing.
2. Not applying more force than necessary when pressing down strings and reducing string noise when lifting my fingers.
3. Being more creative, i.e. creating chord melody arrangements myself and maybe even writing original songs.Most importantly, I want to keep having fun playing the ukulele. And I’d love to meet some people, who I met online through the project, in the real world. Looking forward to 2022.
Wow, that’s quite impressive for just 2 months of playing! Sounds really good and recording yourself is certainly a good idea to identify what you need to work on.
Thanks for the feedback @Stephencox! The muted strums were and still are really tricky for me.
I learned the 2 chord Blues for this month’s challenge. Since I also do the 100 days of ukulele project, which started January 31st, I logged the practice time and published one recording per week to track my learning progress. The other videos are on the same Youtube channel, in case anyone is interested.
In this last recording I think I kind of sacrificed accuracy for tempo. Especially, in the B melody the notes could ring out more clearly. On the plus side the harmonics at the end worked well as far as I’m concerned. In any case a fun and cool sounding song to learn with some tricky parts.
Thanks for sharing your practice plan! I also start with stretching and dexterity exercises and then typically practice particular songs focusing on the parts that are difficult for me. At the moments these are all finger picking songs. I do this for about half an hour and then I play along to songs for about half an hour. This helps with rhythym and training my ears for the chord changes. Sometimes I try to figure out the songs while hearing them, but I often rely on play along videos.
Thanks for the feedback @Aj! I’ll pay attention to how much I lift off the fingers of the picking hand.
I wrote a short instrumental song for this month’s challenge. I used ideas from the lesson “Beautiful Spanish Chord Progression on Ukulele” by Marco Cirillo.
Not Andrew, but I still have a software suggestion @ukandrea. I recently started using MuseScore. It is free and open source software. You can write tabs and standard notation and you can choose from a variety of instruments including the ukulele. It has support for input via a midi keyboard, which I have not tried.
Manual input can be quite tedious. I’ve tried a few other free tools and from those MuseScore is the one I find the most easy to use. I also did some research with regards to automatic transcription. As far as I understand it is quite a difficult computational problem. You may find something for transcribing melodies were only a single note is played at a time, but not for transcribing chords let alone songs with multiple instruments.
Not a tutorial but a play along video, that shows the chords along side the lyrics. It’s in a different key than the tutorial posted above.
Thanks for the kind feedback and your suggestion Andrew! Guess I’ll keep tweaking this for a bit and focus more on being creative with music.
Here is my entry for this month. It is an original song based around the Andalusian cadence in Am, Dm and Gm.
I wrote down chord progressions and short melodies I came up with while playing in the past but never a whole song from beginning to end. One thing I found challenging is striking the balance between repetition and variation. The first version was basically the first 4 measures repeated twice for each key followed by the strumming part and the first 2 measures again. This sounded very predictable and the strumming part didn’t fit in at all. While making it more varied I sometimes felt that it was too much and sounded random so I removed quite a few melody notes. Another reason to reduce complexity was being able to play it myself by the end of January.
Something I like to do in the future is writing a chord melody arrangement for an existing song. Maybe this could be an option to choose from in a future Rock Class challenge.
I wouldn’t pick a single favorite player, but I just came home from the Taimane show in Berlin and am blown away. She is brilliant and so were the other two musicians Jonathan playing cajon and my namesake Ramiro on the guitar. If you have the chance to go to one of her shows, do it. I first got introduced to her in a Rock Class 101 video on YouTube, thanks for spreading the word!
Like jinajupiter I’d love to see lessons on Flamenco techniques for example suitable strumming and finger picking patterns. Another topic I’m interested in is adapting rock songs to the ukulele. How do you choose what to pick, leave out or add so it works well on the ukulele?
Apart from my wishes, I want to thank you for all the great lessons you and your team have created and for how friendly and responsive you are in this forum. You make many people’s lives better by teaching music. I hope you’ll keep on being successful doing that.
