New Year's Ukulele Goals

 So, holy crap, it's been a hot minute (or two or three) since I blogged here, eh? The truth of the matter is that I got completely bogged down in real life stuff, as in, trying to pay my bills while taking care of our 19 laying hens and 5 guinea fowl, 2 bunnies, and figuring out a routine that works while my son does fully remote 7th grade this year in the middle of a global pandemic. Not too much on my plate, right?

Anyway.

I've kept up with my ukulele, and even managed to add a few new beauties to my collection, and now that it's January, I'm thinking about what I want to do with my ukulele this year. 

Watching all of these amazing players on YouTube and Facebook (sorry, I don't have TikTok yet, but I suspect that I will at some point soon), I know that I want to work on my ukulele technique. Over the Christmas break, I even participated in an online Christmas ukulele workshop where I learned some new-to-me jazz chords and worked on some new-to-me strumming techniques. Fun stuff! 

Digging through my vast pile of printed sheet music (I'm old school like that), I found this fantastic book that I downloaded called the Jumping Flea Arpeggiator by Gary Jugert. You can find the free download here and print out your own copy, plus the audio files. 

It's a really lovely little book of thirty different etudes in all keys, using every chord on the fretboard of the ukulele. There's even a suggested order for you to work on these if you, like me, are looking for a little structure to your ukulele studies.

In addition to this, I dug out some exercises of mine (I'll have to find the links later) to some scale runs up and down the neck that I intend to master and practice. 

Last year at this time...well, last year was something weird. Around this time last year, I was gearing up for major oral surgery, and I had just started a year's worth of online ukulele lessons with ArtistWorks, and I was already digging into some of those fretboard exercises. I still practice those almost every day, and when I look back at the videos I recorded compared to how I play them now, I can see how consistent practice in little chunks of time every day has made a huge improvement in my techniques.

In a live feed on my Jen Plays Ukulele FB page, I also talked about how I would love to get back into performing, so I'll be doing more live feeds to get back into the swing of performing. I know that with the way things are right now, performing in front of a live group in the real world probably won't happen for a while...but until that can happen, I might as well practice being real, right?

Anyway. Those are a few of my ukulele goals for this year. I'm sure I'll add some new ones over the course of the year, but for now, I'm playing small (ha ha ha) to set myself up for success. 

Got some ukulele goals for this coming year? Here's a few tips for setting some good ones:

1. Stay small. Sometimes it can help to make your goals actually attainable so that you get that good feeling of actually having accomplished something!

2. But make sure you challenge yourself! Working through all thirty of those arpeggiator etudes is gonna be a challenge for me, but I know I can do it before the end of the year.

3. Make it fun. Make sure you actually enjoy the sound of the pieces you're playing - I've tried forcing myself to play etudes and exercises because I thought they were "good for me", but the truth is they sounded TERRIBLE. Even on the audio files. But that's a whole other blog coming at you soon...

4. Schedule small chunks of time to play instead of one large chunk. This has been recently backed up by numerous studies of musicians - small chunks of time work just as effectively, or even more so, than one large block of time every day. Personally, I keep a uke (or two or three) next to my desk and I'll take "uke breaks" of 5-10 minutes throughout my day just to run through a scale or two or play a quick song. 

So there we go! We're already four days in to 2021 - what are your ukulele goals for this coming year?