Jen Plays Ukulele

 Jeeeeeeeeeezum crow, the days are just flying by. This week is Thanksgiving already, and in the blink of an eye, it's going to be Christmas. I've already started watching Christmas movies and listening to my favorite Christmas tunes, and I've made a short list of some new "unconventional" Christmas songs to learn and play this year on my FB page. (But maybe not my YouTube channel, because one of them is by the Eagles and the Eagles hate covers of their music on YouTube. But I digress...) I continue to make some slow, but positive, progress with these new medicines from the herbalist. I'm cautiously optimistic about it. It's been a long time coming.  Also of note, I did not pick up a ukulele at all yesterday. Which is weird. But my husband now has the creeping crud that my son has had for the last two weeks, and he was just so miserable yesterday with coughing up gunk from his chest and blowing his nose, and our house is very small so there really wasn...

 Last night on our way to a doctor's appointment for our son (we've all had the creeping crud for the last 10+ days), it started to snow, and I asked my husband if I should put some Christmas music on the car radio. He gave me The Look, and then when we crossed into the No Man's Land of very little radio reception (we live in the mountains), I casually switched the station over to the local 24/7 Christmas music station out of Vermont. (But because we just put snow tires on the car, he didn't notice it until we got near the health center and slowed down and the noise from the studded snow tires went away.) So, yes, it's that time of year when many of us daydream about welcoming a new ukulele into our collections. Since I started playing in 2019, I've been able to experience the joy of unwrapping a new instrument on Christmas morning and spending the day casually strumming and plucking away in between board games and cookies.  Not that you have to wait for Christm...

 Well, it's not quite noon, and this Monday can already fuck all the way off. My kid was up coughing until 3 a.m. (And I know because I was awake, too.) Then I went to set up an online store to see if I can sell the jewelry I have sitting around here not going anywhere and come to find out that my checking account has been automatically closed due to lack of activity. (Haven't had a deposit since June. Oops.) And I spent the weekend dealing with the weirdest fucking hot flashes where each one starts out with an incredibly painful headache all across the back of my head, then it turns into a hot flash and the pain eases up a bit, and then once the hot flash is gone, the pain come back for a little while.  But on the plus side, my kid's second Covid test was negative (thank goodness) and I have a frozen Indian meal warming up in the oven for myself, along with some naan bread and ginger tea, and there's a simmer pot on the wood stove that is infusing the air in my house w...

 Here we are! Ready to take everything I talked about in the blogs this week and apply it to other chord shapes? Let's rock and roll this.  So remember last time we learned how to take the F major chord and move it up the neck of the uke. We did so by using other chord shapes in this order: F major (first position), E major (starting on the third fret), C major (starting on the fifth fret), and B flat major (starting on the eighth fret).  It turns out that we can use this particular order to move the other chords in this list up the neck of the ukulele.  Just so you know - what I'm posting here is just the tip of the music theory iceberg that is moveable chord shapes, and I'll delve into some other shapes in the coming weeks. But for now, we can start with these shapes and use them up and down the neck of the uke.  So let's look at moving the C major chord up the neck of the uke. As it turns out, if we play our regular C major chord in first position (like this)...

 So here we are at part 2, ready to take our ukulele chords to new heights up the neck! (Ha! See what I did there? Don't mind me, it's late in the day, and I should be going to bed instead of drafting a new ukulele blog post, but here I am.) Okay, so now you've practice those chord shapes from the previous post, right? Yah? And you got 'em down, right? Yah? Because now we're going to do a little bit of fun with the CAGED chord system and start moving these chords up the neck to add some dimension to our playing.  We're going to start our journey with the F major chord, and how we can move that up the neck of the ukulele. Play the F major chord on your ukulele like you normally would for a few strums. Then place your pinky (or your ring finger, if your reach is long enough) on the third fret of that first string and add a C note to your F major chord so that it looks like this: Now we're going to use the E major chord shape at that third fret on the first str...

One of the funniest comments I've ever seen on a ukulele video was on a video of a performance by the incredible Taimane Gardner . She played up to what looked like the very last fret on that ukulele neck, and someone in the comments quipped, "Taimane paid for the whole ukulele, Taimane gonna use the whole ukulele."  When I was a ukulele beginner, I often fantasized about being able to play all the way up the neck of the ukulele, but back then, I had absolutely no clue how to take those basic chord shapes that I was learning and move them around.  Then around Christmastime, I decided to sign up for a year's worth of online ukulele lessons from ArtistWorks . It was actually kind of perfect - I knew I was going to be laid up for a while after having some major oral surgery, and I was still recovering from two herniated discs in my lower back, so why not take some online ukulele lessons? (I had absolutely no idea at the time that in just a couple of months, the world wou...

 Oh my, it's Monday again, and at least if I can't post every single day like I want to, at least I've been fairly consistent in posting on Mondays, right? So yay? That's something.  Honestly, some days, the brain fog is so bad that it feels like I'm pulling words one at a time out of a giant vat of extra thick molasses. Or chipping them like delicate gems out of a giant wall of granite. Some days, they just won't come at all, and all I can do is just try and survive from one moment to the next.  Anyway.  We're all still sort of drunk on daylight savings time right now, so this morning was sort of a rough re-entry into work and school for everyone. I might bake some brownies this afternoon for my kid, and then figure out some kind of homey warm sweet potato and black bean dish for dinner.  I just can't stand the time changes that we do in this country every year. It's ridiculous. Insanity. And it's not good for our health. (There have been actual...

 Fa la la la la! It's November first, so you know what that means, right? It's time to start playing and practicing the Christmas music!  Soooooo in case you need a little Christmas music for the ukulele, you can find a great book of fingerstyle melodies here for FREE: Christmas Ukulele Chord Melody Songbook This has been one of my go-to resources for free Christmas music for the ukulele since I started playing in 2019. There are loads of great tunes in here, some familiar, some that might be not so familiar, but all beautifully arranged for beginner to intermediate players. You can either sing along with them (lyrics are easily findable via Google) or just let your ukulele do the singing.  Also, stay tuned for some more places where you can find great free Christmas music for the ukulele! Ho ho ho!