G’day lovely people. Hope you are doing well. At the end of October 2022, I picked up the ukulele. This is a quick recap on my experiences, thoughts and to track my ukulele practice progress after three months. My intention is to provide these updates to my future self so I can look back and remember what it was like. Perhaps it may be of interest to you. How have your experiences differed to mine?
My expectations and attitude towards the ukulele has changed dramatically since thinking about picking it up. My initial intention was to strum a little on this toy instrument and have some fun singing. I pictured myself at a campfire or at a beach surrounded with friends.
For the first month, my practice was very unfocused, strumming some chords and messing with the instrument, practice sessions lasted anywhere from 5 min. to half an hour. I wanted to learn “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz. Wrestling with chord changes and strumming patterns, I soon found that singing and strumming took a bit more coordination than I anticipated and was beyond my current skill level. I decided to omit singing for now, (nobody is missing out on my voice) and try to play single notes. I found tabs online and played Aerith’s Theme from the game Final Fantasy 7. This is my first official piece that I could play from start to finish and it ignited a passion in me.
I covered this briefly in another post, but I purchased a few books that I believe would build my basic skills. The four I ended up getting were as followed:
- Daniel Ward Melodic meditations
- Daniel Ward Arpeggio meditations
- 20 Practice Routines for Fingerstyle Ukulele by Jeff Peterson
- Ukulele Aerobics by Chad Johnson
inspirations
It was through the book 20 Practice Routines that piqued by interest in low G Ukulele. Jeff Peterson is an accomplished guitar player, the book itself is also based on a similar book for guitar. It was odd hearing the notes go back lower after the G string when I ran through the scales, and it a fair few etudes were written for low G.
I started to consume ukulele content relentlessly. I was constantly watching podcasts from The Ukulele Site. One particular guest on the podcast really awed me and that was Ian O’Sullivan. (Two episodes he guested in can be found here and here) I loved his compositions and his explanations on how to approach playing the instrument. He shared his music philosophies and how classical guitar techniques translated easily to ukulele. Years and years of classical guitar studies can really benefit us ukulele players! Especially the way we play fingerstyle. Ian studied with Jeff Peterson which so happens wrote 20 Practice Routines. What a coincidence! I was following a lineage of players.
My hesitations about my stubby fingers and the size of a tenor ukulele were swept aside. I wanted to try a low G ukulele or a slightly bigger bodied instrument to take advantage of the low end. I ended up gifting myself one for Christmas. (You can read about it here). I also purchased his graded repertoire for low G ukulele book to send me along the way. I aspire to play Lagrima by Tarrega and the prelude to Bach’s cello suite No. 1.
re-entrant tuning
With so much focus on linear tuning, I haven’t forgotten about high G ukulele though! Brandon Acker – (a guitarist on Youtube that specializes in historical instruments) talks about the renaissance guitar and how it was tuned to the same re-entrant tuning as the ukulele. This was an ancestor to this instrument. The advantage of this tuning was that the melody notes can alternate on the outside strings, allowing the strings to ring. Some people call this Campanella, or “little bell” in Italian. I purchased John King’s The Classical Ukulele to gain exposure to this style of playing and not neglect the traditional tuning of the ukulele.
I decided I will be playing both high G and low G at the same time. I’m not in a hurry and I prefer to appreciate both instruments. I believe there will be synergies between the two. Learning scales and notes will be easier on the low G. This will assist in my mental fretboard map in re-entrant tuning.
VIDEO JOURNALS of practice
One of the posts from the Ukulele underground forum inspired me to start a video journal. I began recording all my practice sessions, just raw videos, no editing. This would cut down the work needed and would be more sustainable to upload consistently in the long term. What I noticed was by having a camera on, my mindset changed and I became more serious and focused. Perhaps wanting to have a decent video by the end of my practice motivated me to some degree. I played for much longer periods, rather than messing around for 15 min. and I had more structure in my practice.
One thing I noticed was, it seems like half an hour wasn’t enough time now. That was the warm up only before I got to all the books I had purchased. I felt slightly overwhelmed in that I would practice for an hour and still not have touched all the things I wanted to. I guess I was a little too ambitious and tried to take on too much. So I’m just trying my best, trying to repeat many things so I can get down the muscle memory, but also tackling a lot of different things, on both high G and low G ukulele.
I practiced spider exercises to a metronome, etudes, scales and also different pieces.
Observations and My mental state
- I had tried to do too much in my 2nd month of ukulele. I wanted to learn everything and have everything down with a short period of time. No. I am not a music prodigy. I needed to dial back what I took on
- There were times where I didn’t want to practice, but seeing the growing list of practice videos kind of makes me happy and motivates me.
- I had a tendency to try to push through fatigue
- I had a tendency to want to play different things rather than focus and get certain pieces down pat before moving on
I have gotten frustrated recently because I feel my progress was rather slow. There were days where I was tired or not that focused I felt I was worse than the day before. The day before I may be playing flawlessly but then the next day I feel like I didn’t practice the day before.
I am trying to take it easy and listen to my mental state. After 10…11 hr work days and chores, I am tired, and when I’m tired, I make a lot of mistakes. I don’t want to ingrain these mistakes as I keep repeating them in practice.
Takeaways for this month
The major takeaways is: Be steady and don’t rush. Take breaks, accept that I won’t be an expert after a few months, things take time. Also, I am trying to have faith that I will improve. To believe. I might not see the results now but if I keep at it I’ll progress. Like climbing a mountain where I can’t see the peak, but after a while I look back, I will see how high I’ve gone.
So What’s Next?
In the upcoming month, I want to delve more into different scales. Major, minor, blues and pentatonic. Practice these as warm ups as I know they will be the building blocks of improv and jazz, which is what I want to be able to do either with a backing track or other musicians! It’s something classical musicians don’t do very well.
I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences! What was it like for you to learn an instrument? I would love to hear your thoughts! Please share them below in the comments!