The Backstory: In 2010, I have set a goal for myself to experience one new thing per week, every week of the year. Each week, I try something I’ve never done before, and then I document my experience here, regardless of whether I succeed or fail. Read more here.
Week: 27
The Challenge/New Experience: Learn a song on the ukulele
Greetings and salutations, Dear Reader, and welcome to Week #27 of the 2010 Challenge! Past the halfway mark now, it’s all downhill from here. This week I have assigned myself a musical challenge.
About four or five years ago, I bought myself a ukulele (a word which, incidentally, I just learned to spell this week — I have been spelling it “ukelele” all this time). Not a toy ukulele, either, but the real deal; I bought it from Musiciansfriend.com. I don’t recall now why I forked out the dough for it, but I remember that I really, really wanted one. At the time, I was playing guitar pretty regularly — meeting up with Scotty Dude on Friday nights to jam, practicing each day, etc. I guess I thought a ukulele would round me out as a musician. Instead, I plunked at it a little bit for the first couple of weeks, then stuck it back inside its little gig bag and put it away in a closet, where it has been gathering dust for nigh these many years.
When I set out on this project this year, I thought about “things I haven’t gotten around to yet,” and ukulele was up there on the list. I kept seeing it in my closet and thinking, “I really should learn to play a song or two on that thing.” So this was the week. One thing I probably did wrong last time was that I tried to use the guitar chords I already had lying around and apply my (slim) guitar knowledge to the uke. This time I purposely sought out uke websites, looking for chords and tab written out specifically for uke. I can tell you this definitively — the best ukulele website out there is Ukulele Hunt — tons of chords, videos, articles, how-to’s, a regularly updated blog. I love this site. I’d bookmark it a million times if I could.
My long-term goal on the ukulele is to be as good as this five-year-old Japanse boy:
Barring that, I would like to at least get that much joy out of playing. Here’s a couple more clips of him: “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and here he is just riffing. I don’t want children, but if I did, I would want this one.
Oddly enough, even though I found dozens of chords for songs specifically for ukulele, the song that I specifically wanted to play couldn’t be found, so I found them for guitar instead. I did find a lot of useful struming techniques which I am still attempting to master.
I do not have video this week. I was going to make a lame excuse about the camera being low on batteries, but the truth is, the anxiety of appearing on camera added to the anxiety of actually trying to perform and sing at the same time was too much. Here is an audio clip, however, of me attempting to bang out “A Little Respect” by Erasure.
Caveat: my ukulele, a Lanikai LU-21 (rated very highly as a good beginner uke on Ukulelehunt.com, incidentally) is a nice little instrument, but needs to be restrung and the intonation is a little off. You will hear this most prominently when I do an Em chord (“oh baby refrain”) — it will sound very off-tune. I apologize for hurting your ears. Sorry also for the tinny recording — this was done on my little cheap-o digital recorder.
Thanks for listening! I’ll be back next week with another New Thing.