Playing and enjoying the ukulele together!
NAMM (the National Association of Music Merchants) is currently meeting in Anaheim, California. It ends on Sunday, January 19th.
Lots of musical instrument manufacturers and publishers are introducing new products. Among them are these great looking ukuleles from KALA…
“Announcing the new Surf Collection by Kala! These original designs were made in house by the Kala design team and they look totally awesome! 🏄”
“The Surf Uke will be starting at $79.99 and will be available in early March!”
As part of her #30DayUkuleleChallenge ‘Bernadette Teaches Music’ provided a YouTube video listing and demonstrating the most important ukulele chords.
Of course, most of them are the common ones. A few of them , however, are good alternate chords by moving a barr chord up the fretboard (example: moving B flat up to form C, D and E.
Pachelbel’s Canon in D is one of the most famous pieces of classical music of all time. In this lesson, Ukulenny teaches us how to play Canon in the key of C.https://kalabrand.com/products/canon-tutorial
Wow! These Luna Vista Series ukes are going to be some fancy ukuleles!
They aren’t on the Luna Website yet, but the guitar versions are around $725. I’m guessing these will be $595 or so. It will be interesting to see. Like them?
Here is the link to the Website with the comparable guitars are – check them out!
Have you seen the series of ukulele books from Hal Leonard called, ‘Strum Together’?
The ‘Together’ part is cool – each song has the chords for the following:
They are intended for casual jams with friends who play other instruments. Since the purpose of them is to allow people with different instruments who may not have played together the arrangements are not difficult.
They are also great for ukulele classes since they give both the standard ukulele chords and the baritone chords.
The music is on the right side page and the chords are on the left side
I have three of them:
There are a few duplicates among the three books…
I have these marked on and in my books if you’d like to see them.
There are three others…
The series can be found here. The names of the songs in each book are listed there.
I know that a couple of them was arranged by Mark Phillips but I don’t know about the others.
Below is an example of the chords page…
The song is on the right side with the chord names, the melody and the lyrics.
“Raymond Penfield was the father of a London Caberet artist, Holly Penfield and often sang often as part of her act when she was in London or Rome. He passed away at the age of 98. He lived in a small California community and sang locally as often as he could. He also had tried out for America’s Got Talent, and was known for his continuing effort to write and create songs with his son-in-law and daughter’ https://youtu.be/O2GTHFeN4LM
This semester I started a ukulele club at the high school that I work at. We have a variety of skill levels so we project YouTube ukulele playalongs. Ukulaliens has become a favorite source of them. I was pleased to see the creation of ‘Ukulele Wales’ which offers a variety of resources including tutorials for their Ukulaliens songs. Nice!
Here is the introductory video for Ukulele Wales…
Ukulele strings can last a long time, but changing them will make a huge difference in sound SO why put it off. It really isn’t that hard, but if you are slow like me it might take a little while. Do it while you watch TV, rest or something.
There are different ways that strings attach to the bridge – a knot, a ball or inserted and looped as above. If your strings are like the above, be sure to start with the G, then the C, E and finally the A so that you can tuck the ends of the strings under/behind the next string and so that the ends will face the bottom of the uke body – you are much less likely to catch the downward pointing strings than if pointed up or were cut (similar to the photo).