Hello My Imaginary Friends,
In case you hadn’t realized, my amazing wife has been learning guitar. When she first started, she was playing on her dad’s full sized guitar and wasn’t sure if she wanted to get a smaller guitar or a ukulele.
At the same time, we’d been binging High School Musical the Musical the Series. In it, one of the characters pulls out her uke and starts to fiddle with it.
It made me miss learning and playing bass guitar.
I stopped playing bass because I had no one to play with and because it was a pain in the ass to pull it out of it’s case and plug it in. I realize this is seriously lazy, but between kids, work, and writing, finding time to practise is hard enough, add in needing to go get it and set it up. Arg. It’s also awkward to hold and practise when your kids are touching everything.
Anyway, I thought the idea of the ukulele was pretty awesome. Four strings, light, pretty noises. When my wife bought her guitar, I said she should get a uke at the same time. We bought a tenor ukulele which is slightly bigger for my large fingers.
I’ve been learning with Yousician. It’s a fun app but has some serious lacks.
I’m learning that my issues with instruments are universal. I’m slow to learn rhythm and have a hard time playing a song I don’t know.
For saxophone, this meant listening to a song over and over again, until I could feel it. For bass guitar, that meant practicing until it felt natural. For ukulele, I think it’ll have to be a mixture of both.
Strumming is the big challenge for me right now, but I’ll keep trying.
The goal as always is to have fun and make pretty noises.
Be kind and stay safe,
Éric