Making Music: Ukulele For Beginners

1. Intro: Ukuleles continue to grow in popularity. Their size, accessibility, and the uplifting sound they produce are all reasons that millions of people reach for this wonderful instrument. They're portable, suitable for all ages, and some of the simplest calls only require one finger. I believe you can build confidence quickly on the ukulele without any previous musical experience. Everyone, I hope you're well. My name's Mark. I'm a full time musician and instructor. I co run a multi award winning music charity that helps people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds access music and build their confidence and creativity. I'm a top teacher on skillshare and I've been teaching on this platform since 2020 with over 20,000 students having now access to my classes because of its accessibility and how simple some of the chords are, ukulele is a great first instrument to tackle. You can get up and running very quickly. It also means it's very easy to pick up if you already have experience of playing other stringed instruments. This class will lay all the foundations required to get you studied and will leave you fully equipped to take your play into the next level, we will cover some quick basics to ensure we understand all the elements of the ukulele and how to tune and read things like card boxes. But we will quickly move towards introducing chords, a mix of songs and some simple finger exercises that will really help improve your overall playing ability. Of all of these elements combined, you will discover your musical potential. I know from over 20 years of teaching that starting the process of learning an instrument from scratch can seem like a daunting prospect. But it really shouldn't be looked at that way. You are able to do this and there will be a way of learning that works for you. Ukulele is a great fun, just the sound of a single strum can put a smile on your face. And I want this class to be like that for you. There will be bite size, easy to follow steps. You can take everything at your own pace. And you will quickly acquire the skills to be able to go and research some of your favorite pieces of music and master those as well. Ukulele really is a brilliant gateway to the world of stringed instruments. Many guitarists reach for it as another option and creative outlet. And many first time ukulele players often then take that leap to guitar as well. I hope you'll start your journey this way, and I look forward to seeing you inside the class. Take care. 2. Class Project: The class project, it'd be great if you could take part in this. Basically all you need to do is record yourself playing any of the strumming patterns, call changes, songs, anything that we cover in this class, upload to somewhere like Soundcloud or Youtube. And then post that link in the project and resources section under this class. If you don't want to share it publicly, that's fine, you could just e mail me. But we are building a supportive community here, so you're in good hands. If you are up for sharing that publicly, it'd be great because we can all learn and be inspired by each other. If you want to take this class project to the next level, you could take any of those calls and call progressions that we've been learning throughout the class. Rearrange them and create your own piece of music. And then record yourself performing that everyone has unique creative ability and expression. And accessing that can be as simple as taking a selection of chords you've learned and rearranging them. And that's it, You are literally writing your own music. So wherever you're happy to share, I do hope you get involved. Reach out to me if you have any questions. And I'll catch you in the next video. 3. Anatomy: So let's start by getting familiar with this instrument and learning about all the different parts. Most commonly, a ukulele will come in four different sizes. You'll see size variations that are called soprano, concert, tenor, and baritone. You do also get a base one, but again, we're not going to delve into that. Now I'm using a soprano size ukulele today. These and the concert sized ukuleles are the most common. The soprano would just about edge that. So if you're looking to buy a ukulele, I would say go and try different ones out your hand shape and size might be preferential for a different sized ukulele. Or if you're ordering one or you're not too sure where to start, Soprano and concert are the main ones. We start with the head stock ukulele, we come down a little bit and we have the tuning pegs. These are literally where we tune the strings on our ukulele. Those strings come away from these pegs across the neck of the ukulele. On this neck you will see these little metal strips and they are known as the frets. And this is where we're going to need to place our fingers when we are playing T melodies or forming our cords as we come across the neck. Past these frets, we have our four strings that are going across the sound hole of the ukulele. This is where this acoustic instrument is gaining its amplification from that sound hole. It's picking up the strings and amplifying what we're playing. The strings are then attached to the bridge of the ukulele. This is where the strings come through. And then to the tune in pegs, we have our main body of the ukulele and we have a little jack socket here where I could plug a lead into to amplify the sound of this instrument even further. Some electroacoustic ukuleles would then have dials on here so that you could individually affect the tone or the volume of the signal that you're sending from the instrument. These parts will remain the same for any of those different sized ukuleles that we spoke about. And just to touch on the longer neck, ukuleles are quite commonly used by people that have already played a stringed instrument like a guitar. They're used to having more threats available. They're used to having that bigger instrument and more range available to them. So they might go for an extended neck, a larger ukulele. We're focusing on our soprano ukulele today. Let's learn a little bit more about what to do with it. 4. Playing Technique: To make sure we get the most out of ukulele, we want to ensure that we're playing and holding it correctly. So to start with, put the instrument on a slight angle and you can rest this lower curve of the body into your fire. This gives you a bit more stability. And also you can bring your arm across to the top of the body, and that helps hold the instrument closer to you again, so it's not slipping away. You don't have to have your arm there. You will see people move it away, especially as you get more used to holding the ukulele. Hopefully it will help you feel a bit more confident and comfortable with it. So just bring that arm over to the body. You can't get a strap for the ukulele. This has got a little point where I could go round one end and then you could either tie it to the headstock of the ukulele, or you will see little nuts that we get fitted to the lower part of the neck, but we don't need to worry about that now. And they're so lightweight. A lot of time people when they are standing up with a ukulele, will just hold the instrument free hand. Okay, so when we're actually playing, we want to make sure we're nice and loose. We don't want to be tense, keep those shoulders nice and relax. We want to be limber. We want our wrist to be loose when we're strumming. If we're too tense, you can really hear that in the play. There's going to be times when you might want to go a bit crazy and play something that's a bit more ten and erratic. But to begin with, it's all about that nice loose fluid movement and we want to feel that in our body. And then you will hear that from the instrument. We're going to go more into strumming later, but just as a brief little run through, you will see some people strum down with their thumb and then up with their finger. We're going to focus a lot in this class on a very common technique, which is where we pinch our thumb and first finger together like a pincer technique. We go down with the nail, with our first finger, our index finger, and then we can come back up with a more fleshy part of our finger. You will also see some people just use their first finger or a combination of their fingers, so they get like a fanning technique. Lastly, a pick might be used. Very common with guitar players, you get more volume, but you also get a bit of a harsher tone I think. And very often with the ukulele, it will just be played with thumb and fingers because you get quite a lot of application from this instrument itself. If you do want to look at picks, you could just get a standard guitar pick. Around 60 meal is an average size. And you can actually get felt picks as well so you get a bit more of a softer and warmer time. I do think it's great to build the foundations early on with the ability to just be able to play with your thumb and fingers. It's really good to build speed to develop technique and you haven't got to worry about having anything else on you to play. You've got the instrument and you've got the ability to make the sound. 5. Tuning: We now need to tune our ukulele. We can do this by ear, or we can get an external tuna. I would highly recommend getting a headstock tuna. One of these, they literally attach to the head of your ukulele. Once that's on, wherever we play on the ukulele, whatever string we hit, this tuna will tell us what n we're playing. When looking at the ukulele, you will see that we have two finer strings on the outside, two thicker ones in the middle. That's usually the case. There's some variations where you might get a thicker string here, but don't worry about that for now. The notes of these strings should be G and A. Don't worry if that doesn't sync in straight away. You can use rhymes to help you remember these. That is a few variations out there. I've heard good children eat apples, go crazy every afternoon was another one. But I would encourage you to make up one of your own if you don't like v those. I had a student ages ago who said goats, cows eat apples. If that works for you, go for that. That tends to be the one that pops in my head. Now because of what she said, see if you can come up with your own one if you want to. You might also notice the direction of the strings, the way they go round these pigs up here by the tuning pigs, they come in and then they go out and around on these top two. So an anti clockwise direction and then a clockwise direction on these lower two. That is to keep the consistency so that we turn the same direction if we're tuning up or down on each tuning peg. Even though it's being tuned up, it's sharpened. If it goes too far past the point of where we need to be, that means it is too sharp. And if a string is coming down, it's being flattened. If we go past the note that we need, it's too flat. And then we'd need to come back up again. The symbols you'll see popping up now are what are used for when sharp and flat are represented. So let's get this ukulele tuned. I'm just going to use my thumb for now to pick these strings. We're going to talk a bit more about strumming and picking technique later on, but if you want to follow along with me, you can. And you can just use your thumb to go across each string. So I'm going to start by getting this headstock tuner turned on and I'm going to pluck that G string. We can see there that, that's bang in the middle. So that G string is nice and in tune down to the string. Now note is showing up there. That means I'm too flat. I need to go from up to, I would sharpen this tuning peg and turning it away from me until that stays in the middle. We've got a nice note coming through. Next string we've got, you can see there pretty much bang on. And then I've purposely made this next one sharp. We have gone past the note that we need, C, that should be, you can see the red appearing, so we need to flatten that until it comes down. The reds, we're just in that middle and we've got a nice sound. And that's it, Ukulele is perfectly in tune. I promise there's just one more lesson to go through some information and then we're gonna get started with a proper plane. 6. Chord Boxes & Tab: Okay, so one more lesson before we move on to the proper plan. When we're learning a piece of music or we're learning a cold, it will very often be presented to us on tab lines or in called boxes, so we need to understand how to read them. If you already know how to do this, then feel free to skip that lesson. If not, let's break it down now. They're not like scored sheet music that you find in the classical world. They are much more accessible and easy to digest version of that. Let's look at cold boxes first. When these are presented to us, you will see lines that come down vertical lines that represent the strings of the ukulele. The lines that are coming across represent the frets that we find on the neck of the ukulele. Little circles will then appear on the vertical lines, the strings. These show you where your fingers need to be placed and what threats they need to be behind. You will then often, not always, but hopefully see little numbers appear within these dots. Those numbers represent what fingers you need to use behind those threats. You will also see an A circle. This will represent open, meaning you can strum that string, but it's just played open. No fingers need to go down on any threats, and you might also see an X appear. This means you don't play that string. You either miss it when you're strumming through the strings, or you use another finger to mute that string, you don't hear the sound. The cards that you're seeing in that call box now is an F major card. You'll see that our first finger is down behind the first fret of the G string. You'll see that our second finger is on the second fret of the G string, and that our C and our string are open. Next up, you'll see tab lines. Now, these will have four horizontal lines, and they are the strings of the ukulele. At the beginning of those lines will be the nut, which is where the neck of the ukulele begins. And you'll see that the string names are represented down the left hand side. Now this might not always be there, but get familiar with where that GCE and A string appear. So you know what order those lines are in. Now as we come across from that nut and you work along those horizontal lines, you might see a circle and O on the G string. That means you just play that open once. You might then see two number four on the string. That just means you play the full threat of that string twice. You might also see cards represented on those strings. Those numbers that are appearing on each string show you what threats you need to play. And if you want to know what fingers to use on those threats, then refer back to the call boxes. The numbers you're seeing at the moment on that tabline represent that F major cold. And if you've forgot what fingers to use, you can look back at that F major call box and see what fingers are needed. And that's it to start playing this thing. 7. Strumming: Right. Let's start making some beautiful sounds with this lovely little instrument. We spoke earlier a bit about strumming. We're going to go into that in more detail now throughout this class. And I've probably done this already. If I'm just doing a single strum, I might just use my thumb, so let's try that. We're going to rest our arm across our body again so we can hold that ukulele nice and close to. It's not too tight. We don't want to crush it. It's just there to support everything and we're just going to bring our thumb down over the sound hole, just to the left of the sound hole. We got a nice bit of amplification there, but we're not too close to the neck. You will get different sounds as you move around the body. Closer to the neck. Quite a warm tone. You'll get a much thinner tone if you go closer to the bridge, so we're just off center over the sound hole. That works really lovely. If you're just doing those little single strums, you've got a warm tone there most of the time. Throughout this class, we're going to use that pinching technique where we put our thumb and our first finger together. Our thumb is there to support the first finger, and we're going to use our nail to go across the strings. Just try that for me. Open strings, you could have your hand that's free, resting on the body of the ukulele as well. If you want a little bit more support, pinch that thumb and first finger strum across those open strings. You can hear that nail in there. So we get a little bit more bite to the sound. As you come back up. You've caught every string on the way down, fleshy part of the finger on the way up with a bit of an angle. And you can see the motion that we're making there. Generally, we're looking to catch all the strings, especially in this initial practice. But as time goes on, you might be playing a cold or a piece of music where you don't need all those strings and you can become more definitive with your technique when we're strumming. Nice loose wrists, don't be too tense. We spoke before about shoulders and not really tightening ourselves up. A lot of the ability for strumming comes from the movement in the wrist. We're not looking to move our shoulders or our whole arm, we're just moving that wrist it's that looses which eventually will really help us go a lot faster with this strumming technique. To try this for me, we're just going to do four down strums with our thumb, then four downs strums with a thumb and first finger pinched together. Pull this if you need to do those downstrums and try to get a nice even volume and tone coming through. Once you've done that, add up strums, we're going to go down, up, down, up with our thumb and first finger. That's everything you need to get up and running with strum in this euclele. Let's take that a bit further and start to learn some 8. First Chords: We're now going to start learning our first calls, and very shortly we're going to be playing our first song. The beauty of these calls is that they can be played with one finger. We're going to learn a major and a minor in the simplest form, the difference between major and minor. Major has a more happy sound, a minor has a sadder sound. We'll break that down in a bit more detail later on. First call we're going to learn is major. Now you would see some people suggest that you play this with your first finger. Your first finger generally being your strongest finger, you would place that first finger behind the third fret of the string. And I'm just strumming down with my pub there. But we're going to play this cord with our third finger because it works really well for when you're transitioning into other chords, which we're going to do in a little while. So if you could put your third finger for me, nice and close to that third fret of the A string. We don't want to be right on it because then we lose the note. We don't want to be too far back because we start to get a bit of buzz. We want to tuck nice and close, just behind that third fret. Now I'm using my first and second finger to come down onto that string as well. They're not making any difference to the sound, but they're helping support that third finger, so we're able to really pull out that tone and clarity that we're after. If you want, you can bring your pum a little bit over the neck, which might help pull that third finger against the threat board. Give you a little bit more strength and stability. But don't come too far over because you don't want to mute that G string. Generally, if we could come down more towards the center of the neck, that will allow us to fan our fingers out further. We come up, the more we restrict our fingers, it's harder for us to fan them out. If we bring that thumb down more towards the center of the back of the uculele, you can see that that movement allows my wrist to drop and my fingers to spread out a little more. So try and do that if you can, then. I'm just using my thumb to strum through all four strings. Another little mention is that we want to be on the tip of our fingers when we're putting that third finger behind the fret. Make sure you're nice and pronounced on the tip of your finger. We don't want to be too flat because that could bring problems where we start to mute the open string above it nicely on the tips of the fingers. Nice curve, clear tone, coming through Lovely. Again, I'm strumming with a thumb there. If you want to build the habit of the thumb and first finger, then that's cause well, next up, a minor just needs one finger again. We're going to use our second finger. I'm going to place that second finger behind the second fret of the G string. That second finger comes down nice and close to that second fret. Nice pronounced curve in the fingers as well, so there's not too much risk of that pad of our finger muting the open string underneath naturally, My thumb has come a bit further over the neck. I've gone from that C up to this a minor. You can still drop that thumb down and that will help give a nice curve clarity. Or some people you'll see will bring that thumb up because they might be anticipating that they're going to need it in that position. Their hands going to need to be in that position forever their progression is, and whatever call they're going to next for us. If you can get that nice curve, that's wicked, drop that thumb down. If your thumb needs to come up, that's okay. As well. As long as that second finger is behind that second fret of the G, Let's now try and strum between each of those calls. Get your C major ready once you're comfortable, just a single strum, let that ring out, and then get your second finger up to that A minor. I'm not looking to do this really quick, but what we do want to make sure is that every note is coming through, nice and clear when changing calls. We don't want to bring our fingers too far away from the neck, away from the fret board. The further we go away, the further we have to come back. It's all those small little cuttings of time that make our playing a lot smoother. And those transitions a lot clean and a lot easier. Nice and close, C major to a minor. When you've got that sounding clear, try to apply just a little 1234 count. You don't have to do it out loud, and it don't need to be nailed on like a syncopated time, like a metronome, you can just give yourself a nice free flowing count of 1234. So you've got some sort of reference and you're committing yourself to a time that you've got to change. So I'll give a little count in, we'll try that together. If it's a bit tricky, pause this video and try and do that on your own. 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. Lovely. Now don't rush through that, don't cut any corners. Make sure those notes are coming through nice and clear. Get those transitions smooth. And then when you're ready, we'll tackle another couple of chords and then a song. 9. G Major & F Major: Let's get two more colds in our locker. We're going upper level, but you've got this first one we're going to do is G Major. We're going to put our second finger behind the second fret of the A string. Nice and pronounced really important. We get that curve in these fingers here and we're right on the tips because we're going to be a bit more bunched in these cos that's nice and solid. Behind that second fret of the A string. A third finger then comes up to the string above the string, and we want to be behind that third fret. Can already see how we're getting a bit more cramped here, but if you keep that curve in that first knock, that nice pronounced feel, and look to it, this is going to come together lovely. Our first finger then comes up to the C string and goes behind the second threat. And our G is open. Let's pick through each of those, one at a time. And A, as you pick through, I'm using my thumb there. You can rest your thumb on the following string as you pick each one and then we just pull away for the last one. Now, that might be tricky at first. Like I say, you're really having to bunch your fingers there. Now, my thumb has come over the top of the neck. This is another one. If it helps you become more pronounced onto the fingertips, bring that thumb down, bring it more towards the center of the neck. And that will allow those fingers, that hand, to stretch out a little bit more. It's all personal preference here. You're not going to do yourself too much damage or harm if your thumb comes right up. You will see some players go like that and you'll see some people bring their thumb further down. Everyone's hand shape and size is different, so don't stress too much about it, let's focus on getting the clarity and the correct technique for each of those cards and notes that we're creating. Major. So now we're going to move to F major. This is a tricky change from this card, so don't worry about having to get a smooth transition. Now, let's put our fingers away and rebuild from scratch. We're going to put our first finger. We saw this in the court box earlier, didn't we? We've had a little bit of a head start. Our first finger goes onto the string behind the first threat. Again, we want to be nice and pronounced because we've got an open string coming out underneath. And then our second finger goes up to the second fret of the G. We've got an open C and an open A. Thumb is quite low for this one, but we can bring it up. The risk of doing that is it might pull your first finger down a little bit as that thumb comes up. Which if you haven't got the correct technique in early on, the pad, the underside of your index finger might mute that open a string if you need to, if your hand shape dictates it, bring your thumb further down. That allows your fingers to be on more of a point and allow those open strings to come through. I'll move that third finger a bit out of the way so you can really see where that second finger is. In your own time practice going from that G to F major, like I say, more of a tricky call change. But at all times we're looking to keep our fingers close to the strings, close to the threat board. You don't want to come too far away and reshape everything for now. All little adjustments and eventually that transition will become really smooth. 10. Song: You Are My Sunshine: We're now going to learn our first song, You Are My Sunshine. A beautiful piece of music, very beginner, friendly, and hopefully familiar to most people. The chords we need are a C major, an F major, and a G major. Again, you'll see me using my thumb here for a warmer tone, but I'll also jump to the thumb and first finger. So I'm demonstrating a bit of that as well, so that you're covered for whatever you're doing at home. Let's start by single strum. In these calls, let's build our major first, third finger behind the third fret of the A nice single strum through each of those strings. Everything coming through nice and clear. Our first and second finger are down as well. To apply a bit more support in the son, we're going to need to move from our C Major up to an F Major. Your first finger just goes up one string. Try and make this movement as subtle as possible. Don't come away from the fretboard and have to reshape everything. Let's make this movement as smooth and easy as we can. First finger creeps up to that string, third finger comes off, and second finger goes up to the second fret of the G. We're in our major. Let's do that, change once more, C major up to our F major. That change happens quite a lot in the song, from major up to when we go from back to have your third finger hovering around the area that it's going to need to go to next. There's no point in having it up here far away. We know we're going to need to re, fret our major, have it just covering around the area above that third fret of the A string. Third finger comes down first and second, move back in position alongside it. The other change is going to be from A major up to a good thing about having our first and second finger down is our second finger is already where it needs to be, have it quite close to that second fret, because as our third finger comes off and goes up to that string to start to form our major, a second finger hasn't had to leave the fretboard. What can look like quite a complicated shape and you'd imagine would be quite a big jump, is actually broken into quite a smooth and more easy to obtain. Movement. Major, back to major. Same finger plies. Second finger there. Major up to major. We don't want to give ourselves too much work to do. We're going to start with a simple strumming pattern. It's just going to be downtrms to begin with the pattern, and the progression is going to be coming up on the screen if you want to try and follow along with me. We're going to do eight down strums on the C Major. We're going to go up to an F Major and do four strums back to a major for four strums, again for four, again for four, and then there's another two strums on that C Major. I could have said six, but I quite like breaking it down into those smaller sections. Four on the C, then two on the C, and then two on the Major, and then we end with four on the C, or you can just do free strums on the last major, cut out on that last strum, and let the lead melody play over the gap. But that will all be a bit clearer in a minute. Let's give it a go. 1234. Take your time for that. Don't put too much pressure on yourself if you need to stick with those downs strums for a while until you're feeling confident, until you're sure that everything's coming through nice and clear before you know it, it will sound great. 11. Finger Exercise: I'm now going to throw in a little finger exercise that's going to be really good for our stretching capabilities and the independence of each finger. It's also going to work on the independence and pick inability of your strum in hand, whether that's your right or left hand. So we're going to start by going to the G and we're going to play an open 1234 with our first, second, third, and fingers. And I'm going to use my thumb to begin with just with down plucks. For each note that we need to hit, we go open 1234, I've got one finger per our first to our full finger covering each threat. You can already see how that's going to work wonders for our stretching capabilities. And this is going to give us really good preparation for some of the calls that we're going to tackle later on open 1234. We're then going to try it out on each string. You notice my thumb is quite low for this one, so that I can really fan those fingers out and stretch across four threats. Once you've played on the G, go down to the open 1234 and resting my third and four finger on the body of the ukulele. Just to give me a little bit more stability, you can just pull that ukulele in with your arm if you'd like to. And use your left hand or whatever your fretting hand is to counteract that and give it more stability. Pull against each other. We then move to the next string. And the string start this exercise really slow. Make sure that every note is coming through as clean and clear as possible and that each of those fingers remain behind the threat that they've played. Next, we're going to use our thumb and first finger, we're going to alternate the order of them. So we're going to go thumb, same pattern, thumb, thumb, thumb, thumb, thumb, and so on, on each string. Once we've done that, we're going to use our thumb or our thumb, and first finger, we're going to work our way up the frets, and then we're going to reverse it. I'm providing these slight little alterations because when you're practicing, it's really important that you don't just do the same thing every time. You can start with that to build consistency and make sure what you're doing has got clarity and it's correct. But then each time you pick up the ukulele, try to add a bit of diversity, train your brain in different ways. Really work it. Don't get too comfortable and complacent with each thing that you're taking on the moment that you feel really comfortable and confident with something, it's probably a sign that you should change it up. If you're playing with the thumb and you're doing that open 1234, you can do that on every string quite fast. Add that thum first and then think, okay, I'm going to add the reverse as well. Or you could go up on one string and then down on the next string. There's so many possibilities for alternations. Last one, which is going to start to work on our strumming hand a little bit more. We're going to alternate our first finger and our second finger with the same pattern. We'll go all the way up and back down. We'll go up and reverse on each string. A lot of these techniques and the approaches in that way where you make slight alterations and you mix up, the way that you practice these techniques comes from the classical world. My classical guitar studies would work on loads of variations of this sort of approach. Violin players would do a similar thing. So I think it only makes sense when you're playing a stringed instrument. When you have those threats, when you're utilizing both hands in that way. To start to think about adding these kind of exercises, this is a nice simple beginner, friendly one to throw into this beginner friendly class. But there are tons of variations out there. So I encourage you to go and have a little look and see what you can find. I'll start to think about how you could apply that elsewhere on the fretboard. Maybe you could slide up to another block of four threats. Maybe you could miss a string. Take your time to think about that. Approach it in a creative way, and you'll really see how exercises like that start to develop your overall technique. 12. Chord Development: We're now going to cover a wider range of cards. Some of these are a bit trickier, but they're really important for giving you the best foundations early on in your ukulele plane, there's going to be a mix of major and minor. Again, let's have a look at that in a little bit more detail. To build a major card, we take the first, the third, and fifth of that particular cards. Key those three notes together form a major. If we was in the key of the root, the first note would be, the third would be a B, and the fifth would be a D. That has got that happy major Sound. We formed a major, major Cad. If we wanted to make that a G minor cold, we would take that third No, that B, no, and we would flatten it. A semitone, in fret terms. That would be one fret back. So our B note is found here. We would move that back. One A semitone, that would be a B flat or an shall. But because we've moved backwards, we'd refer to that as a B flat. So the major cold would be a B and a D. To make a minor version, we would flatten the third one semitone and make that B a B flat, G, B flat and D. You would have minor and theory. That principle applies to every key and every major and minor cord that you're forming in those keys. We don't need to jump into those of theory now, you don't need to overwhelm yourself. It's just nice to have those little bits of information dropped in here and there so you're starting to form a bigger picture of how this wonderful world of music is all put together. The first new cord for us is an E minor. We're going to put our first finger behind the second fret of the A string. We're then going to put our second finger behind the third threat of the string. And we're then going to put our third finger behind the full threat of the C string. Our G is going to be open and we're going to want to pluck all four strings. That is our E minor card. Be nice and pronounced again with our three fingers that are down. We want that curve because if we start to let them drop, they will interfere with the strings that are underneath and we'll get that muting sound, which we don't want really on the tips of the fingers. Drop the thumb down for this one, so you can really fan those fingers out and get that spread and that distance nice and easily. We have minor, let's make the major version of E, then. This is a tricky cards. You will see some very complicated versions of this. I'm going to quickly demonstrate them, and then I'm going to show you an easier, more accessible way to get up and running with this card. Very commonly you will see this bunched version of Major, by all means, have a go at this, but don't put too much pressure on yourself. It's all right if you can't get this straight away. It is a complicated one. Our second, third, and fingers all need to be bunched onto that full threat. The G, C, and E strings. You can already see how tricky that is going to be, but it will come, the more you do this, the more you make those small little adjustments. Your hand shape and size will tailor and we'll fit to this. Eventually, you're just going to have to find those small little movements that allow you to play it. Everyone like I say, is a little bit different. So if you can get those three fingers bunched onto that full threat, you're going to need a bit of an angle on your wrist coming away from the threat that you're fretting. So that allows you to get that distance and that separation and that angle to bunch everything in. Because our first finger is then going to come down onto the second fret of the A string. And all four strings are plugged. We're really incorporating our fun there to clamp against the neck to help us apply the pressure that we need for all fingers. Hopefully you can already see that finger exercise we did a little while ago really helps these sort of cords we're using every finger, so it's handy for us to build the strength like we were in that exercise. And we've got quite a stretch going on, we're using a four fret distance. Now first and third aren't being played, but we've gone from the first to the fourth because these fingers are all bunched up on that full threat. Another version of major that you will see I personally really like, but it's not recommended for beginners. It's something to build towards, but we're going to have a quick look at it. Anyway, the first finger goes to the first fret of the G. Your little F four stretch over to the full threat of the C string. Your E is open. Nice. We haven't got to worry about that. And our second finger goes onto the second threat of the string. Tricky, but I really like that open string in our finger, gives it a nice bright feel. Okay, so let's look at a bit of an easier version of major. That first version that we did, we're all bunched up with three fingers. I think we can just play that with one finger. We need a bit of a curve in that first finger. You can see that there from either angle, there's a slight curve so that I am not applying pressure to the string. The G, C, and E string are all being played with that first finger. Bar in the strings. That's what you hear that referred to. Sometimes it's a bar because I'm barring across more than one string. Again, I'm using my thumb to clamp that neck to really help me apply that pressure. Just try and do that. Put that first finger across those top three strings on the full threat. You've got every note you need there to make major. The first, the third, and the fifth that construct a major card all exists there. Major is made up of G sharp, and we find the B here, we find that note here, and we find a G sharp there. That bar can just be moved around. Once you've got that shape nailed experiment, we're moving it up and down the fretboard. It's a nice little exercise to apply to your plane and your practice. As long as you keep that principle where you play the top three strings. You put a slight curve on the first finger and you mute the high string. You are going to be moving chromatically, meaning one fret at a time or a semitone at a time. You're going to move around the whole chromatic scale. The chromatic scale is every note that exists in Western music. If you keep that shape going, you have got the major for every note that exists in Western music. Try that. You can see the chromatic scale we've got. We go up to, we go up to sharp, We go to, we go to sharp and so on. You could work your way up and down. We'll leave that in a PDF for you, which will break things down in a bit more detail and hopefully makes sense. But please feel free to reach out to me if you've got any questions about that. Next up, D minor, we are going to put our second and third fingers onto the second fret of the G and the C string. Second finger goes down first and then that third finger tucks underneath, similar to what we were doing with the first version of the E major. There'll be a bunching going on there, so the thumb drops down. The wrist has got a nice curve in it to allow us to get that arc, that space. And then our first finger just tucks in on that first fret of the E string. Then our A string is open, really lovely Sound to it, that called. Let's move from the minor into the major. Now this is another one that I will see people bunch like this. The first, second, and third all go behind the second threat of the GC and string with an open a string, all four strings. Now I personally think that's quite a tricky one to do. Those strings are very close together. Those threats are very close together. It can be hard to bunch all of our fingers into that area. I find just swapping the first and the second finger round frees up a little bit more room so I'd recommend trying that. Your first finger goes down onto the string, your second finger goes above it, onto the G, and your third finger goes below, onto the, all behind that second fret, still with the open string. The beauty of this shape as well is it links into two other cords really nicely that are in the same key. In the key of D, you will have a major cord. We can go from that D major cord into the major. A second finger is the only finger that needs to leave the fret board and change. Do you notice that? And our third finger are already on the right strings. The third finger just moves across one threat. The first finger is already where it needs to be. It just adjusts slightly to accommodate the room for the others. And our second finger leaves and goes onto the second fret of the A string. We've now got a major called to try that slide from your D Major into your major. Go back from your major into your D. We're going to learn one more called here from a D Major. We're just going to slide our first finger back. One threat. Take our third finger off. We've now got A Major, which is also in the key of D. Our first finger was the only one that needed to change. Our second finger stays on that second fret of the G, O and our A strings are open. We have an A major called slide that A major back into D major. Third finger goes onto the second fret. First finger tax back in. We're back in D major to try that progression. Go to back to D, to A. Back to D. Really lovely. I'll start on the A, D, to back to D. Back to A. Lovely. Why you're on that? A Major. Do you remember the shape for F major? All you've got to do here is move your first finger down one string. We are now in F Major. First finger goes back up one string, A major move that first finger down allowed a note to be open. The string, we have F Major. That's another nice little progression to practice. Always look for those opportunities where cords link, where a finger doesn't need to leave. That finger is called an anchor finger. And it helps us make those cool transitions smoother, easier, and faster. 13. Song: Three Little Birds: Let's now get another song, Sid. We're going to look at Bob Marley's Three Little Birds. We're going to focus on the chorus because it just needs two cold. It's a progression we looked at a little bit earlier on. I'm also then going to throw the verse you pretty quickly, but leave it in the PDS for you to go and challenge yourself with. You know, all the calls we've covered them so you will be able to do it. I'm going to give you a little head start and then you've got free rein to go and explore the rest yourself. The chorus, we just need an A major to put your first finger onto that first fret of the A string. Second finger over to the second fret of the G. And we have an open and A A major. We are then going to slide into our D major. Remember that from before first finger slides along, one third finger, tucks underneath second finger, stays exactly where it is. And we have an open a string at the bomb to play fruit at progression. We're going to start just with downs strums, we're going to do eight down strums on the A major, four down strums on the D major, then back to four more strums on the A Major, and then that process, that pattern just repeats. So we're going to have a count of 1234, and we want a down strum to land on every number just like this, 1234. And that is every chorus throughout the song, start by single strum in those, just to get that progression moving nicely, remember subtle little movements? We don't need to do anything really drastic to make this chord change. They're all very close together. Once you've got that moving smoothly, start to apply those downstrums. Singing the worrying, because every little thing is going to be all right. You hear there that vocal comes in just before the melody starts. We get a 123 singing the worry. And that music comes in on that next beat of one. And we play the downstrums on every number if we want to make that more like the original. So we bring in and incorporate that reggae style, so it's got that nice pulse to it and those little stop starts we need to play on that. And so we've done 1234. In between those counts, those beats we can hear an and which would be like 1.2 and 3.4 And now instead of playing on the 1234, we're going to play on the s that exist in between. I'll show you what I mean, 1, 2, and 3, and 4, and 1, and 2, and 3, and 4, and 1, 2, and 3, and 4. And so when you're ready, try that to take it to the next level. We want to stop those strings dead, so we get that nice sucking out sound and that nice pulse, which really starts to emulate the reggae style. It'd be like this 12 and free to get that pulse. I am just relaxing my fingers after I play on the end beat. I relax wherever fingers are on the threats so that the note cuts dead. And to help ensure those notes are cut out and the open strings are also cut out, bring down my third and my little finger, most importantly, my little finger there across the rest of the strings, only strong enough so that it mutes the sound. It cuts it dead. It's a soft little landing onto those strings with a little finger just so the sound stops. I don't want to apply any threat pressure, start to get something very different. We just want to suck everything out the same. When we go to the D, our third finger is now taken up. That's why we want to prioritize our little finger to try that very slowly. For each cold, play one strum, and then just rest your little finger onto the strings. And make sure you bring these up slightly. The fingers that are fretting, not away from the strings, but just loosen the pressure, release the pressure a little bit, and you will start to get that really lovely reggae vibe. We're learning three little birds here, but start to experiment that with other colds. You've learned quite a chunk of colds now to start to think, okay, can I apply that strumming pattern elsewhere? You're starting to open the door to creating your own music. You've got a lot of stuff in your locker now, so experiment with it. Don't just be confined to what we're learning here. That's a great starting point and there's lots of guidance in this class to help you along your journey. But you've got a lot of tools now to start thinking, okay, how can I be even more creative? How can I add a lot more experimentation and unique creativity to this process? The, I'm going to let you tackle these in a bit more detail, but the A and the D exist in the verse and there's just an major prone. The A major will then slide up to an, remember we did that with a bar, then we will go back to the A. Get that change in your head. A major major, go back to the A. We then bring in the D, which we've already done, A T, D, we go back to our, a nice simple change up to the E once more. We then slide back to a D. You could just keep that bar shape, or which I'd encourage from the bar of the E go back to the D shape we're familiar with. Because we then move back into the to finish the verse. I'm getting a little bit quicker here with instruction, but you're starting to level up and like I say, there's no pressure here. The chorus is an important starting point. It's the easier part of the song. You've got this little guidance and you've got the PDF. You can definitely do it. Just have a little run through that verse with just the downstrums on the 12341234, and I stop as that verse comes to an end on the beat of 3123. So it leaves room for that singing. Don't worry for the chorus to come. Let's just do a quick example with the reggae beat over that verse, 1.2, and 34. And I threw in that little extra strum on the free, we still get that same where it sucks out leaves room for that singing, Don't worry, chorus line to come in another song. Let's move on to the next lesson. 14. Timing: We can learn a mix of calls and songs and apply single strums, which is great. But to kick on to the next level, we need to advance our strumming capabilities. And to be able to do that, it really helps to understand a bit about timing. Timing with music is constructed with beats and bars. A piece of music will be broken into multiple bars, and within these bars exist beats. We break music down into bars so we can separate sections and gain reference points. Think about when you hear a piece of music start. Someone might count 1234. Well, that 1234, once the music has started, is still going on behind. It's basically the backbone of the music and it helps keep everyone locked in time. You will also sometimes hear bars referred to as measures, but that's more in the classical world, most bars have four beats in them. This is known as 44, and it's the most common type of time signature. There are others that exist like 345478, but we don't need to worry about that yet. We can use a metronome to help increase our awareness of timing even more. This is great for practice because it holds you to account. It is a syncopated piece of time, meaning it's not going to vary. It's not going to run off or go out of time, wherever you set it to, it is going to stay at that exact speed. A lot of bands and artists will play along to a metronome. You won't be out to hear that, but that will be fed into someone's ear or going on somewhere in the background. It basically means they are going to be playing at exactly the same time as the record or whatever time they've set for themselves. When you're setting a tempo, you'll see BPM appear. This is beats per minute. So if we was to set a tempo at 70 PM, that means we're going to be running at 70 beats per minute. You can get physical metronomes, they're really lovely. You would have seen them back in the day sitting on top of the piano. I've got one of them at home. There's still a few around. But obviously in this modern day and age, you can just get apps for you. You can get one on your phone called Metro Timer, which is really good. It's free. I will link that below. So I'd recommend starting there and when using something like Metro Timer, and you're setting your BPM, let's say we're at 70, you might get an accent on the first beat. This accent will help you understand where the one comes in again, how 12341234. And it will sound a little, something like this. There we go. That's a count of four, set to 70 Pm. With that accent on the first beat. So we know when that bar is looping and starting again. If I was to play along to that metronome and strum on the first, you'll hear how that really holds us to account. I need to make sure I'm ready to strum when that first beat comes round again. Let's have a four count to begin with and then I'll play. There's nowhere to hide. That beat is going to come round at exactly the same time every time, and you need to be ready for it. So you can see how this is really good for your practice. Developing awareness of time and also improving your overall technique. Timing is paramount when you're developing as a musician. You don't always need to be playing along to a metronome. But it helps to get an awareness and a grounding of it. Now when we're thinking of that steady beat, that syncopated 1234 dance music is a really good example of that. There's lots of things looping, it's very easy to dance and move along to. There's nothing that throws you off course we've got that nice steady beat. Also with music you might have a very complicated riff that goes on and lasts for a long time. But the backbone of that music might just be a simple 12 free for 1234. And it's the elements that are occurring over the top of that, they go a little bit more experimental that a little bit longer, but you've always got that solid background. Now obviously not every piece of music is like that. Many musicians won't play to a metronome live. They want to change the tempo on the fly in the moment. But on the flip side of that, you'll get a lot of music that will use it, or a lot of people that practice to a metronome or record their records to a metronome and then be a bit more free flowing and flamboyant when they're a live. Let's have a quick little practice with a metronome now to develop our time and awareness even more. Don't worry if you haven't got a metronome downloaded or one at home yet. I'm going to play that beat so you can hear it. And we're going to try and play along together former C major called for me. We'll keep this nice and simple from a cold perspective to begin with. And we're going to play pretty slow with a 70 PM metronome. We're going to single strum on the first bet. We're going to have a 1234. That next one that comes in, we're going to single strum our C major. We're going to do that twice. Not too complicated. Hey, we're now going to start strumming on every beat, and we're going to do that four times. So we have our four count to begin with. And then we're going to play 12341234, Strum on every beat four times. Let's give that go Now let's try to move after four beats from major to a minus. We're going to get a 12341234 single. To begin with, take a second to finger about a minor if you need to, it's just a second finger. Moves up to the second fret of the G with a first finger behind if we need to, to give us a bit more stability. See how you need to make sure you are at that next cold. By the first you can hopefully see how as you become more advanced with your playing with your call changes by having this metronome running, it's going to force you to make those changes quicker so you land on that next beat. We don't want to cut any corners, we don't want to cut off the sound and the resonance of the first we're playing. It will make us stay there for longer. And then that second split second we move to the next. And that's obviously going to push our technique and our ability to be able to move between calls even quicker. So keep it at 70 pm. Let's do four strums on the C, four strums on the A minor, excellent. If that's really comfortable, pick another two calls or pick four calls and start to do four strums on each start with a single strum, then start to fill those gaps. We're now going to fill even more of those gaps by applying a strumming pan. 15. Strumming Development: We're now going to push our strumming abilities and awareness of timing a little bit further by incorporating a slightly more complicated strumming pattern. Now this strumming pattern is very common with beginners and is then used throughout all levels of ukulele or guitar player. Very good one to get sorted early on. It's, and we're going to use G major in this lessons if you want to start thinking about that. Called that'd be great. We mentioned earlier about the beats that exist in 1-2 3.4 Well that can go a lot further. You get 1.2 and three Aranda and even more than that. But we're not going to go that far today. We're going to focus again on those and beats. But we're going to start to miss some beats. And rather than just play on every beat that exists when you start to chop little parts out, that's when you start to come up with these really cool and creative patterns that you hear in a wide variety of songs. Rather than just playing on every beat, the 12 and 3.4 let's start to remove little elements. We're going to play on the 12.4 that's going to make a bit more sense with the visuals rather than me just throwing ends and numbers at you. But let's try and have a go form your G major called. We're going to play this slower at this time. We're going to go down to 64 BPM, just so it's hopefully a little bit more accessible. And that metronome is not going to be pushing us too hard. There'll be a four count again, and then I'm going to demonstrate that. Down, up, down up strumming pan. Nice. So you can see how we can start to be a bit more free flowing around that metronome once we're not being so rigid, we're not trying to be syncopated and play on every, even though we are still landing on the S T to make sure that you've got a relaxed feel with it, you're not too tense with it. We want to have an awareness of timing. We want to be in time, but we also want to be free flowing and have that lovely fluid feel running alongside that metronome in your own time. If you haven't already grabbed this Metro Timer app for free on the App Store, and then play along to 60, 04:00 P.M. or even slower if you need to. To begin with, we're now going to throw a call progression in at the same tempo. We're going to go from major to minor, to major, up to major. We're going to apply that same strumming pattern to each call. Remember, we can use that last strum as our notification that we need to get to that next call. Once you've hit that last strum, really be ready to push your fingers over to the next call in the progression on that major. I want to move to that minor and make sure by the next time that, that first comes in, that first down strum, my called is ready to be played. So let's give that a go. I'm gonna demonstrate that now a 1234 count. And then we're gonna go through each four of those calls with the same strumming pattern on each one. Again, you can see how that really starts to hold us to account. It's great for our overall development, great for our practice, our technique, and our awareness of timing. Quick reminder of that D major, the last card in the progression. When we move to our G major, the first card, our first finger is already on the fret. We need our third finger just slides over slightly, and our second finger goes underneath. We're in G Major. Always look for those little opportunities to make everything a bit easier for yourself. Let's look at another song. 16. Song: Stand By Me: We are now going to look at the song Stand By Me by Ben E King. Don't worry, you've done all the hard parts in the last lesson. Because that called progression, that called structure that we learn is exactly what we need for this song to play along to the original recording. You're going to need to get a capo, which is one of these handy devices which if you don't have one already, I definitely recommend getting. But don't worry, you're not going to have to use it for this lesson. I'm just going to use this opportunity to quickly demonstrate what they are when we play calls in the positions we've been working on throughout this class. They are called first position cords. They're open cards in the first position, like our major. If we use a capo, we can change the starting point of our net. We'll attach this bar just behind the fret like we would our fingers. Nice and close, but not right on it. And then that becomes the starting point of our ukulele. We shift our cord shapes up, They're shaped in exactly the same way, so a C major would still be the same, but rather than our third finger being on the third fret, we have put our capo on the second fret. So we need to move everything up too. Instead of the third fret, that shape becomes the fifth fret. That C major shape is still played, but that's now technically a D major cord. That's how we can shift keys of music. That's how we can change our ukulele to play a different key of music. For something like stand by me, those card shapes work in the first position, but they're in a different key to the original recording. If you want to play along to the original recording, this pattern that we're going to learn, you just put that capa on and shift it up two frits. We did the progression in the last lesson, our major over to our minor to major to a D major. The only difference here is we use the same strumming pattern, but we stay on the major and the E major longer than we do the C and D. The C and D change quicker, the dow up strumming pattern. But we do eight beats on the, and the minor, and we do four beats on the C and the D. We're going to play this without the metronome now, so we can be a little bit more fluid with everything. But we've done our metronome practice, and that's already in the back of our minds. We've developed our time in that little bit more. And the strum through that major to minor major to D major, the counter, the beats will come up on the screen if you want to play along. Wicked. If not, watch it through pause and then have to go yourself 24. Then that progression just loops again and you have got the whole song. Those four chords can be used for the whole song. You play your Euclid in the first position. You're not going to sound in tune to the original recording, but you can practice that whole song in this key. You want to play along to the original recording, put that Pa on the Second Threat and play exactly the same progression. Be mindful of the fact that that major and D Major happens a bit quicker, Don't get too comfortable or complacent with the eight beats that are counted on the G major and minor, because that major is going to change a little bit quicker to the D. Remember to link the cold, Lovely, you've got the whole song. We can also touch again on the fact that your last strum is that transitional, so don't worry. Sometimes you'll notice that a player might actually catch a couple of open strings in between the movement of the colds, the major, two minor, if that's quite tricky, that last strum where it's transitional, you might actually be in the process of moving to the next cold. And that's okay, because those little open strings are actually going to resonate quite nicely with what we're doing. So don't stress too much if that last strum is cut a little bit, but obviously we're always aiming for the fact that that last strum is still on the G major or whatever call you're doing first. And then the first down strum on one is ready for the next called Excellent. Let's jump into the next lesson. 17. Unlocking The Fretboard: We're now going to look at some more chords that are really going to open up the threat board for you. They have got chromatic abilities. This means that they can be shifted one threat semitone, up or down. The whole shape can be moved in that way. This means once you've learned one shape, we're going to start with B major. You can very easily make this A major, a C sharp major, A D major. Or you could go the other way from B major and make that a B flat major. It's a really, really cool thing to unlock. So let's start by forming a B major shape. We are going to put our third finger onto the full fret of the G. We're going to put our second finger onto the third fret of the C. We're going to put a first finger across the second fret of the E and the A. It's like a little bar shape. We worked on these bars a little bit earlier with our A major cord. We're going to be incorporating that technique into this. Cold thumbs quite low on the neck for me here because we've got a free fret stretch going on here which is quite expansive if you're not used to it. Remember that stretching exercise we did earlier? Again, great example of how that helps. And we want to make sure all four strings are coming through. Nice and clear bar with the first tips of the fingers. For the third and the second finger, we have our Major. If I move this up every finger across one threat, I've got another version of major. If I go again, sharp, sharp, and another version of I love it when you start to unlock these cord shapes because it really does open up so many possibilities on the threat board and makes massive changes to your plane. Let's turn that B major into a B minor Fret that shape again for me. First fingers bar and the second threat. Third and second finger go onto the fourth and third threats. We are going to take that second finger off, our first finger is now going to bar that string as well. Here, the difference there, more of a happy major. Sound We go into our minor. We spoke earlier, the one difference that we make from a major to a minor colt is we take the third of that major colt, which in this example would be a D sharp, and we flatten it, so it becomes a D. The D sharp is there. We have our second finger, we take it off, we use our first finger to bar. We have the D. We've made B minor lovely, and that has chromatic abilities as well. Move that B minor up. We have an area that we can play C minus, C sharp minus, minus D sharp minor brilliant. It opens up so much to you if you're struggling with barring the strings. There's a little exercise that I use and teach on guitar that helps with this. Start on your second fret. We can do this on any threats. Let's go for the second because we're getting familiar with that. Just play the string with the first finger, then move it up. We're covering the E and the string play both using our thumb to clamp at the back so we can help get that additional pressure to really squeeze the neck. Not too hard, but enough so the fret comes through. Creep up another string, Play all three strings. Creep up one more thumb might need to move a little bit, and then play all four. You can just repeat that process, making sure that every note comes through. And then you can do that anywhere on the fretboard, making sure each time those notes are nice and clear. That's just a really simple little exercise that will help develop the strength in the first finger. You could also do it with a second finger. If you really wanted to start to develop the strength of those as well, you could do that of any finger. Let's just hear a little major to minor progression. We're going to form our B major. We're then going to slide it up two frets, but take that second finger off. Use our first finger to bar. We've now got a C sharp minor major. C sharp minor Sounds lovely. Start to experiment yourself. Pick another area on the fretboard, or pick another order, another combination. Start with a minor, go up to a major, do two minors, do two majors, throw a minor in a bit later on, just start to experiment and see what you can come up with and create. I'm also going to attach a chart in the PDS which will show you a load more examples of Cods up and down the fretboard so you can get yourself even more well versed with them. 18. Fingerpicking: We've spent a lot of this class working on strumming with a little bit of picking with our thumb and first finger, where they are going to take that finger picking idea a lot further. Because it's a very popular and common technique with the ukulele. And a great thing for you to incorporate and develop. To begin with, we're looking for our hand to come down across the strings over the sound hole. Again, the same with the strumming principle. We don't want to be too flat across. That's going to make it harder to pull out the sound that we want from each string. So come more on a downward angle and again rest in our arm. Our picking our strumming arm across the top of the body of the ukulele to give us a little bit more stability, Our thumb is going to play the string nearest to us. In this first example, we want every string to come through, so we're going to allocate a thumb and then our first, second, and third finger to each string, like So when we're plucking each string, we're looking to come away from the ukulele cross because we struggle to get as much definition in the sound. We're plucking away, but not too hard because we don't want a harsh tone. We're not looking to get that nasty noise. A nice soft glide across that string, just plucking it away. A nice, smooth and even tone. 12341234. We can use our left hand, wherever our fretting hand is, to support the ukulele a bit more against our body, so it's not slipping away from us. Just try that. Just try and get a nice, smooth, even tone with your thumb. And each finger already sounds lovely and we haven't even put any calls in. Let's use a major, nice, easy one to do a new exercise with. Get your C major called Fred. We're now going to play with that 44 time signature that we spoke about before. We're going to play on each beat, 1234, Let's give that a go. 1234, You can start to change the order. We know how many notes we're playing, we know how many beats we've got. Let's start with a top string on the one, and then work our way up for the 234. Let's miss one. Let's go a. So many possibilities when you're practicing this. Don't just stick to one string at a time in that exact order. Down and then up, start to mix it up, start to experiment. That really keeps us on our toes. Let's take that a little bit further and play on the 12 and 3.4 I'm going to work my way up to strings 1.2 and come back down, and that is just A and C. 1.2 3.4 and 1.2 3.4 This experiment with the order, again, I'm going to start with the open G, and then I'm going to play the string and work my way back up. Pick other calls. There's loads for you to experiment with. There, there's a few options of patterns that you can play. Now, start to introduce your majors, your A majors, your D majors, wherever you would like to, and move between them as well. When we are finger picking with that arm resting over the body of the guitar mount times. I've said guitar in this class, I'm sure there's a few that I've missed. When we are finger picking and our arm has come over the body of the ukulele and our hand is hovering above those strings ready to pick. You might see some people rest their wrist onto the bridge of the ukulele. If you're struggling for stability and struggling to hang your hand over, you feel uncoordinated. For now, you can rest your hand down onto the bridge. It's a nice option to have. I'd encourage you to develop this technique. It's good to have that freedom to be able to move around the strings. Just slightly restricted here to the angle that you can use. You will see people do that, so don't worry if that's something you end up adopting and developing. But be mindful that it'd be great to bring this more open hovering technique in as well. And likewise, if you need a bit more stability, you will see some people rest a finger or two onto the body of the ukulele While they're picking, you don't want two fingers down there. If you need that third finger in action, it could just be the little finger. But if you're just using something like your thumb first and second, maybe that third would come down onto the body as well. There are options there that you can use if needed. But do try and develop that technique where you are just nice and free and open above the strings. Let's talk about another very popular common time signature, which is 68. Sometimes you'll hear this mentioned as free four. They're similar but there is a big difference. Free four has free beat accented in a bar. It's a bit like a waltz, so let's use a G major as an example. 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. There's three strong beats within each bar. 68 accents, two beats. And there's more of a swing field to it. Imagine like a pendulum swinging, that's the sort of vibe that this is creating. 12, 345-612-3456, Technically, the same amount of beats could be fitted into each bar. Especially if you was to do 1 and 2, and 3, and 1, and 2, and 3, and 1, 2, and 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. But it is noticeably a different feel. There are some song suggestions popping up now, which I recommend you go and check out that are in 34 time and 68 times, and see if you can notice that difference. The next song we're going to do is in 68 times. So to get ourselves ready for that, let's practice a little call change with that 68 field, we're going to use the Cad major and G major and play in a 68 time. I'm going to give you a 123456 count and then we're going to play that twice on each called two rounds of 68 on each called 123456. If that was played in 441-23-4123 412-34-1234 in 6 8 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Hopefully that is all making sense and you've got a lot more stuff to choose from there as you continue your ukulele playing development. Let's put that into practice with another song. 19. Song: Hallelujah: Let's put all that finger picking into practice with a beautiful song, Hallelujah, by Leonard Cohen. There's been a lot of covers of this massive, one, stunning one. It's Jeff Buckley's version of this song. There's lots out there, but I encourage you to go and check that one out if you don't know it, but you should recognize this melody. If not gun research, it's a lovely piece of music. The chords, we're going to need a F major, A minor, lovely change from F major to A minor. We just have to take our first finger off. We have a minor major first finger off, A minor. We're then going to have up to major, back to not too bad. Eh, we're going to apply that 68 finger picking pattern to these chords and we are just going to work our way down the strings and then back up on that F major, it would be like this. Then we go to a minor, back to major to major. The length of each call, the bars that we need to play, will be coming up on the screen. You've also got the PDF that's attached to this class to help you. This section that we're playing is the actual hallelujah chorus of the song. There's some more calls throughout the verse, throw them into the PDF as well if you want to check that out. But for now we're just going to focus on this chorus. I'll give a 123456 count and then we'll get going. 123456 Hall, Hall, Hall, Hall. I'm really not much of a singer, I do apologize. Hopefully that gives you more of a reference and detailed example of how the vocal comes in and then that music drifts along underneath it. Go research that song a little bit further if you want to look at the rest of the chords, all the best of it. Let's jump into the next lesson. 20. Practice Schedule: I get a lot of people ask me what a good practice routine would be when they're learning the instrument. So let's have a little talk about that. Regular practice is obviously key, but it's also really important to apply patience to your development and persistence if you want to develop skills as a ukulele player, all of these points are really important, little and often is fine. I appreciate that everyone's lifestyle is different and it can be manic. It can be hard to fit in something like this into your daily life obviously. But it is very therapeutic. It's a beautiful skill to be able to develop. So if you can find the time regularly, then that's great. Every day, if possible is obviously a bonus, even if you're just picking the Ukulele up for five or 6 minutes and you're just running through a little something, doing a little exercise, doing a couple of those call changes, that's really, really beneficial. But obviously that ain't always possible. If you're just picking it up two or three times a week, then that's great. Maybe just make those sessions, those practice sessions, a little bit longer than if you was able to practice every day. So this is how I would look at a suggested 45 minute to an hour practice schedule. But obviously these are just guidelines. Don't feel like you have to copy this word for word, minute for minute. You just apply this to your life, to your routine. And whatever is possible is absolutely fine. Warm up five to 10 minutes, this is a great start. You could use those finger exercises that we worked on earlier, the chromatic exercises where we're covering four threats. But make sure you alternate the pattern of these. Don't get too comfortable with just one idea that you're working on. Or some simple cold transitions here will work really well. Single strumming between a couple of colds that aren't too complicated, just to get you warmed up and apply the metronome to this. Even if it's a couple of minutes with the metronome, a couple of minutes without, you could start at something like 60 pm, and you could do your exercise along to it. Or you could just strum between a couple of colds and gradually push that tempo as well. Again, we don't want to get too comfortable the moment we feel like we're in that comfort zone. Embrace it, but then push it just by adding two BPM each day or each time you practice is a really good place to start and a really good way to keep your playing pushing forward. Next up, some songs, ten to 15 minutes for this would be great. It's a brilliant way of incorporating the chords you're learning. And by looking at new songs, the chances are you're hopefully gonna learn some new chords as well. Pick songs you love. I totally appreciate that learning an instrument to a song that you can't stand is not an enjoyable process. I had a couple of experiences like that. When I was really young and first learned guitar. Some teachers come into schools and they would have this set routine of the pieces of music you had to learn. And I didn't like it and I lost so much interest really quick. And then I discovered this guitar, who said bring along a couple of CDs of band you love. And I will find something in those songs that we can learn in our first lesson. Within 20 minutes I could play in the Varnas Come as you are, and it changed my life, literally. So always look for opportunities like that. Hopefully, there's a couple of pieces of music in this class that you like. I can't cater for everyone, but you've now got the right tools and everything you need to go away and learn songs that you do love. So start to look at that and then incorporate that into your practice routine. You're warmed up. If you've played some songs, some cards now introduce finger picking. This could just be taking the colds you've already been working on. And instead of strammin them, we're gonna finger pick them 44 times. The 68 time again, you hit a comfort zone. Challenge yourself, push yourself, keep your practice varied. Add the metro name to this. Gradually increase the tempo and research songs you love that include some finger picking. And if they don't just add some finger picking to the calls that they use, lead melodies. Now I know we haven't covered these loads in this class, but there are some melodies that I've played over the tops of pieces of music that we've been learning. And I've included the tabs for them in the PDFs underneath this class. So you could start by practicing them. But obviously there are tons of melodies out there. Hopefully, over the songs that you love will be some lovely little melodies. You can look at a website like Ultimate Guitar if you want to find the tabs for ukulele songs or guitar tabs if you're good with reading them, which you've got an understanding now, because of the early call boxes and tab lesson that we've done, you could take lead rifts from other instruments and apply them to the ukulele. This would also be a good place to add scales in as well. We haven't tackled a scale yet, but there are some easy ones that you can get up and run in with with a little bit of research. So this could be a good section to apply that lead melodies and or scales. And then finish up with creative expression. A section that I love and I always encourage in students. I firmly believe that everyone has unique creative expression and it's a good time to start discovering yours. Don't set too many boundaries in this section. Be nice and free with it. Maybe jam along to one of your favorite songs. See if you can work out the lead melodies that are going on. See if you can discover any of the notes, or find a section of notes, an area on the fretboard that sounds really good over that piece of music, and start to just play around with those. You're then creating lead parts over the music you love. You might even be able to work out some cards. Challenge yourself, that's ear training. See if you do work out any of the cards or any of the notes. And then check the tabs online and see if you've got any of that correct, and then take that step further. In regards to discovering your creative voice, we have learned a ton of colds now, strumming patterns, finger picking patterns. You've got songs that you can reference in this class and extra PDFs. You've got tabs that you can research online. Once you see those colds, reverse the order of them. Chop and change. Move them into different places. If there's one strumming pattern, apply your own strumming pattern. If there's no finger picking, add some finger picking. Pick colds at random, C, G minor. What do they sound like together? Start by single, strumming them. You don't like that order? Change them round, F, G, A minor. What do they sound like when they're in different orders? What do they sound like with finger picking? Not always. Starting with your thumb on the G string, move that around. Really try to experiment with and alternate and chop up and change everything that we've learned. That might sound crazy or counterintuitive, but the things we have learned form a really good basis for your instrument, your musical development. It's now time when you're ready and if you want to, not all the time, but allocate periods where you just experiment with that, you demolish what we've learned. You start from scratch. You start to interpret that in your own way, in a different creative way, because again, everyone has this unique creative expression. As always, reach out to me if you've got any questions about that. 21. Final Thoughts: You've made it to the end. A big well done, honestly. That is a huge achievement and you should be proud of that. I say this all the time, but learning an instrument is incredibly rewarding and you've got a really exciting journey ahead of you as a recap. Starts slow with everything, persevere. Don't cut any corners. Make sure you iron out all those little creases. We've got the notes sounding clear, we've got the cool transitions smooth. Don't lose heart. Don't lose sight of where it will get to. Patience is key here. You persevere without regular practice or little and often, and it will all start to come together. Don't put too much pressure on yourself. The smallest steps can create the biggest breakthroughs. Remember, everyone's hand shape and size are different. You might just need to make these small, tiny little adjustments to resolve any little problems or struggles that you're having with certain cold shapes or techniques to your practices. If any of those colds are calls in your trouble, remember to just step back, pick one string at a time. Ensure each of those are coming through clear, then apply to single strums, then start to progress towards moving between different colds, and apply that same principle to each one. Eventually they will just be second nature. They will come to you so easy and everything will be sounding lovely and smooth. A metronome is a great help for this. Remember we spoke about that a few times? Start really slow, 60 PM if you need to. And then gradually build that tempo at a couple of BPM each time. Don't always have to use your metronome, but it's nice to have it there every now and again. Cement that time in awareness, cement that development and then start to come away from the metronome on and off. And you'll really knows how your timing is improved while we're mentioning a metronome. If you want to get a hard standing metronome, they are really lovely. If not, then you've got some really good digital ones that you can get. They're popping up now. They'll all be linked in the description below as well. Or you could just go as simple as getting that metro timer app or whatever one you can find. There will be tons out there that you can get for free. Definitely recommend a headstock tuner. You saw how essential that was in one of the very early lessons, so look into that. And a capo, we didn't have to use it. In the end, we played stand by me in the first position in our open key. If you wanted to play along to the original, then get yourself one of those capos. You can get a guitar one, they're longer, they will fit over the neck, but it doesn't line up the pressure as accurately as a small capo would that's specifically designed for a ukulele. So check one of them out again, I'll link it all below. Get learning of the songs, research the songs you love. You have got so many calls in your lock. In there, you are going to be able to tackle a lot of pieces of music. You'll be surprised to start researching them when you are playing these pieces of music or when you're just practicing along to this class or your own practice, remember to keep those strumming patterns loose. We don't want to be too tense around our shoulders, our wrist. We don't want to be too rigid. Keep everything nice and free flowing. When you are researching songs, the atomic guitar website, really good one to check out. They've also got a decent app as well. And be creative, believe in your own creative ability. It's really exciting to start that journey. It's something that can seem very daunting when you haven't done it before. But hopefully this class has begun to demonstrate how simple and accessible songwriting can be. If you're taking part in the class project, you could just record that on your phone and upload to soundcloud on Youtube. Like we mentioned earlier, if you want to go a step further and use some recording software, then I highly recommend checking out this class that's popping up. Now I do hope you take part in the class project. It'll be amazing to hear what you're up to. Again, share that publicly or send it to me privately. That's not a problem. Even if you don't send the recording, I highly encourage you to record yourself playing. It's a great way of gaining extra awareness of where you're at. There's something about seeing your finger positions and the way you move calls. If you've recorded the video as well, or even just hearing yourself back, if you've just recorded the audio on your phone or whatever you're using. That's definitely a really good reference to have. So I'd encourage you to go and try that. Reviews are huge, they're massive when it comes to helping me understand how these classes and the content are received. And they also helped other people discover the classes. So please, if you don't mind, lay down a little review. Your journey doesn't need to end here. There's so much ahead of you. You know, you can go and research all those extra songs. Keep an eye on classes that I'm creating because I'd love to do more of this in the future. Definitely let me know what you'd like to see and I'll start to think about how I can put that together. Post Discussions. I'm always available for questions and I will get back to everyone that receive or reach out to me on the socials or e mail. If you'd like to take your musical development even further and you'd like to learn guitar or bass guitar. Then I have got multiple classes that cover these instruments. They're popping up around now, so please feel free to go and check them out. I wish you all the best with the ukulele and your learning journey. Let me know how you get on. Keep an eye out for more classes because there's plenty more content coming your way. I hope to see you and another one soon. Take care.