Category: Practice Tips

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Bernadette suggests ’20 Most Important Ukulele Chords’…

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.

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Play by ear? No? Check out ‘The Toneway Project’


The Toneway Project has been around many years but I’ve just learned about it.  I’m quite interested because I am addicted to music books and don’t try hard enough to play by ear.  I know very few of the songs but I’m learning to play a little better by ear.

Ex: recently I considered buying a ‘glow-in-the-dark’ Makala Waterman and then it occurred to me if it was dark then I couldn’t see my music and couldn’t play any songs. Sad!

You can learn to ‘jam’ by ear. I CAN learn to ‘jam’ by ear.  NO songbooks or songsheets. Let’s do it!

 Going to a bluegrass jam group introduced me to ‘The ToneWay Project’. They offer some great products BUT you don’t need to buy a thing to benefit as their Website offers a lot!
 – Ukulele lesson videos (first one is about 30 min. others are 9-15 minutes or so) – http://toneway.com/learn/ukulele-lessons
 – Sound clips of many songs that are featured in their books- http://toneway.com/songs
AND much, much more.
A couple of the leaders in the jam have a book from ‘The ToneWay Project’ called ‘Family Tradition Songbook’. It has 371 songs with words but no chord charts or letters (only numbers like 1, 4 and 5). It is only $.7.95.

There are even a special method book and a songbook for the ukulele.

 BUT the point is you don’t even need books.
I’ll close this post with their motto:
“Many think you must get good to play with others. We say it’s better to play with others to get good.” Source: Toneway.com
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Determine the BPM of a song’s tempo

Determining Beats Per Minute of a song to use a Metronome
Determining Beats Per Minute of a song to use a Metronome

On a metronome you set the ‘BPM’ or ‘Beats Per Minute’. Occasionally the BPM is marked on music.

If you don’t know the BPM you can determine it using one of many apps or by using TempoTap.com. Here is what you do…

Determine the BPM of a song’s tempo.

Use the space bar to tap each beat. The BPM (beats per minute) will be automatically computed to determine the tempo of a song. The more beats you provide, the more accurate the resulting BPM will be.

There are separate directions for using touchscreen.

Here are manual instructions for determining BPM of a song via WikiHow.com.