It’s fair to say I’ve helped a few newcomers to ukulele in my time, whether that’s been my own kids or people that emailed me for some extra tips. One thing I notice when it comes to rhythm though is that a lot of ukulele beginners are far too eager to stop strumming. What I mean by this is, it’s very common for beginners to stop their strumming arm from moving if there’s no strum to be played. It makes sense right? Sort of. When I taught myself to play guitar many moons ago I picked up an awful lot of bad habits but the worst of all was my timing, or lack of it. I didn’t count beats, I sort ..read more

Throughout 2022 I didn’t play much ukulele, this has happened a few times since I started playing. I lose interest from time to time and I just kind of stop. There’s one skill that I’ve never fully got to grips with though and this year I’m determined to make some real progress. That skill is playing by ear. I’ve written about playing by ear before and I can usually pick out melodies relatively quickly. Working out the chords though is quite a leap and I’ve never been great at it.  So the commitment this year is that I’m not going to look up the tab or music for anything. I’m not going to ..read more

Many years ago my dad expressed an interest in playing ukulele but was suffering from rheumatoid arthritis and wasn’t sure whether he’d be able to play. I wrote a post connected to this and it sparked a lot of interest from others with similar issues. But what has this got to do with playing ukulele with one finger? Ultimately the reaction to that post made me think more about playing restrictions and how a player might get around them. And so I set myself the challenge to create a piece of music that used only a single finger of my fretting hand to play it. You can hear that piece of music i ..read more

Recently I’ve been teaching my 10 year old son to play ukulele, as I’ve been teaching him I’ve spotted some of the mistakes that he’s been making that are very common among beginners and others that I’ve taught to play. Today we’re going to look at some of those mistakes and work out why they happen and how to correct them. Let’s get to it. Strumming From The Elbow Almost every beginner strums from the elbow. This results in quite a rigid wrist and more often than not this means that your finger is strumming across the strings horizontally. It sort of works but it brings a few issues, the mos ..read more

Moving from strumming to fingerpicking is when you know that you’re starting to get a little bit more serious with ukulele. In this lesson I look at 5 fingerpicking patterns that you can use as a starting point to move your fingerpicking skills forwards. Before we get started, the chords I’m using in the video to demo these fingerpicking patterns are C, Cmaj7, C7, F, G7 and back to C. You don’t need to use the same chords as me, this lesson isn’t about your fretting hand. We’re just aiming to focus on your picking hand so feel free to use whatever works best for you. The Claw The claw is prob ..read more

In this lesson I’ll walk you through a simple solo ukulele arrangement of the nursery rhyme Itsy Bitsy spider (or as I knew it growing up, Incy Wincy Spider). This simple arrangement was taken from David Lawson’s excellent Ebook Fingerstyle Classics. It’s quite a simple one to learn so if you’ve never done any fingerpicking before it’s a great starter piece to exercise your fingers and get them used to picking the strings individually. Itsy Bitsy Spider Tab Here’s the tab if you’d prefer to work directly from it rather than along with the video. Itsy Bitsy Spider Lyrics Here are the lyrics if ..read more

Often I’ll be noodling around on the ukulele, strumming chords I know and I find it very easy to stay in the comfort zone and play something that really doesn’t require much effort on my part. SO I set myself a little challenge to come up with something using C, F and G that sounded rather nice but was also relatively simple for beginners to get to grips with. Here’s what I came up with… In the video I walk you through the arrangement so you can learn it for yourself but I thought it was also worth talking about the choices I made and why I made them… Chord Substitutes Rather than playing the ..read more

Playing songs is one way to practice but it’s also important to focus purely on technique sometimes. So today we’re going to take a look at some exercises that will develop your fretting hand abilities. All of the exercises below are intended to develop your finger dexterity, speed and finger strength. They’re a good way to warm your hands up before you start playing, or perhaps before you start to learn a specific song. The 1234 We’ll start with the classic 1234. For this we start with our index finger on the first fret of the G string. We pick the note and then add our second finger to the ..read more

Back in 2016, twelve year old Grace VanderWaal turned up on America’s Got Talent with her ukulele in hand and stunned the audience with her original song I Don’t Know My Name. Grace went on to win America’s Got Talent and subsequently signed a record deal with Columbia Records. Today we’re going to learn how to play the song that she debuted on America’s Got Talent back in 2016 ‘I Don’t Know My Name’.  Let’s do it. The Chords The good news is this is a very time song that uses just four chords and those four chords are very likely the first four chords you ever learned. Yep, you guessed i ..read more

When I first started to learn guitar (well actually it was the second time, the first time I gave up fairly quickly), I often wondered whether I was actually capable of learning to play. My Story I’d never learned an instrument before, I didn’t take music at school and I’d never shown a natural ability when musical instruments were present in my life. This got me thinking whether learning to play an instrument is just something that some people can do and others can’t. Almost like the chosen few are born with a natural ability that just needs a little encouragement to develop. But, I was young ..read more