Don’t you think you ought to learn how to take off and land the plane first?

Perhaps you’ve admired those stunt pilots who turn and spin in the sky, leaving behind a trail of colorful smoke. Now suppose you decide you want to pursue that skill and take some stunt-flying lessons.

It would be a pretty good idea to learn now to take off, fly level, and land the plane first, right?

So who do so many beginning ukulele players (and players of other instruments, as well) want to start learning fancy “strums*” and fingerpicking patterns when they haven’t yet learned some of the very basics of rhythm and melody?

Like venturing into the woods without a basic knowledge of the terrain – memorizing a step-by-step set of moves is okay as long as you don’t get lost.  But take one step off the beaten path and you can suddenly find yourself lost, both in the woods, and in the music.

Think of how much more satisfying your playing experience would be if you knew a little of what you were doing. This doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice all other musical exercises until you know all about theory and rhythm. There are plenty of things to learn, and as long as you are learning something – you are doing good.

Fortunately, if you get lost and don’t know that to do while playing the uke, you won’t find yourself plummeting  toward the earth in a death spiral.

But take the time and effort to learn the basics. It’s worth it.

 

* Strums… let’s say “strumming patterns” instead.

 

What’s Missing in Teaching Ukulele…

Imagine if you were interested in cooking and wanted to take it a bit farther than simply following a pancake recipe on the back of a box of pancake flour. Imagine wanting to actually know how to mix ingredients to make what you are wanting to make; to know what various ingredients do when added to each other.

I would think that you’d take a culinary class. The teacher wouldn’t give you pre-measured, color coded portions of mystery powder and a recipe that was pulled off a questionable website – they would teach you units of measurement: teaspoon, tablespoon, cup, etc. They would teach you about oven temperatures and how to season properly to achieve the desired effect. How does yeast work? Why? Vinegars, sugars, flours, corn starch…

A good teacher would teach a willing student about cooking.

So why doesn’t this happen as often with ukulele instruction and group meetings?

Why are so many players content to learn the minimum with the least amount of effort and playing off of inaccurate song charts pulled from the internet? I hear them “say” they want to get better, but….

I see uke players “charts” scribbled full of instructions: strum [C] 12x [F] 4x UDDUUDDU…  No actual musician I have ever played with ever counted 12 “strums” of anything. We are taught to think in measures (groups of 4,) so we would think of 3 measures (groups of 4,) followed by one measure… (so much easier to count and keep track of)… and all that DUUDD business only works if you already have a knowledge of what down and up means.

Why aren’t teachers teaching this?

Well, I have two reasons to offer: One, is that they themselves don’t know. They are self-taught, doing the best they can with what they know, and they are happy to share it. That’s cool.

But here’s a more important reason it’s not being taught: many ukulele players don’t want to do the work.

I’ve had several students who, after telling me they want to improve their playing, suddenly decide they aren’t that interested after all, after finding out that there will be some work involved.

I’ve taught a lot of private lessons, group lessons, and workshops over the years and I have come to realize that many ukulele players (and players of other instruments, as well) don’t really want to learn about music – they just want to hold that cute, little instrument in their hands and be part of a community.

And that’s fine. As a matter of fact, that’s more than fine – it’s great! No entry fees, no tests, no… nothing. “You’re in!” Heck, you could bring a picture of a ukulele and be as welcome in a uke club as if you had an actual instrument.

But as people begin to want to learn more about their instrument and participate in Open Mics, bands, and other group activities – they are in a position where a basic music education would be helpful.

And I want to provide that. I want to teach you about the basics: notes, chords, rhythm… because you will be and feel amazing as you experience what it has to offer.

It’s not easy. If you want easy, sit down in front of the TV and do nothing – that’s easy. Everything else takes effort. But it’s worth it, and it’s fun, and what else are you doing?

You say you want to play the uke and get better?

Let’s do it!

 

Take a Hard Class

Wouldn’t it be fun and informative to be a fly on the wall at a top level meeting where they are discussing a topic that is of interest to you?

Perhaps you have an interest in marketing and would like to know how the big decisions are made about logo placement and audience targeting – wouldn’t it be an eye opener to sit in on a meeting on a top floor executive meeting? Or imagine another “inner working” you’d like to be privy to… like music.

I teach a lot of music in both private and group settings and something I have observed is, that in many cases, students just want to review what they already know, or they are there just to have fun.

I often start a workshop by asking the attendees why they chose my particular workshop – in this case, a workshop on leading and following during play-alongs. One lady responded, “I just wanted to play some songs.” When I informed her that though we might be playing some songs in the class, we were really there to learn how to be a song leader and how to follow others who were leading. She got up, packed her uke, and left.

That was both a good thing and a not so good thing. One one hand, it’s good to be clear on what you want – on both our parts. She just wanted to have some fun, and I made it clear that I was going to teach some useful information. We both were better off. (By the way, we did have fun while learning.)

But it got me thinking about how much one could learn by challenging oneself. It’s true that reviewing information is helpful – taking an easy class to confirm your existing knowledge, but there are so many opportunities to do that without paying money to attend a festival or workshop series. Think of how much that woman would have learned about playing together – which was actually what she said she wanted to do!

And that brings me to my first paragraph’s statement: wouldn’t it be fun to be in a group where they are discussing top level information?

Why not take a class that is hard once in a while? Challenge yourself! Sit there politely and let the “know-it-alls” talk, but rather than look frustrated and let things “go over your head”, you simply listen and absorb the information discussed. Sure, you won’t know everything they are talking about but take notes and imagine yourself in that league. Make it a goal to someday soon, know what they are talking about. Put it in orbit! 

I remember as a young man, sitting in on rehearsals with a bunch of older musicians who were in a salsa band. I was so eager to learn and so honored to be allowed to sit there and listen to them discuss rhythms and how to improvise. Once in a while, they would let me play a simple part, but mostly I would just sit there and observe. I didn’t interrupt nor try to divert the conversation to something I could understand – I just listened. Wow, what a difference it made in my musical learning.

So I ask you: what do you think about what I’ve said?

Musical Seeds Need Time To Germinate

I often hear my students say that some part of their musical learning is not happening, such as new chords or strumming, or some little doodle I taught them. I try to remind them that these skills, like seeds, take time to germinate. It doesn’t mean that the seed is dead – it just means that some sprout faster than others and, with care and attention, they will all sprout eventually.

Continue to work on your strumming patterns and rhythm in general, even if your chords aren’t up to par yet. Or, work on your chord shapes while you slowly get a handle on your strumming hand coordination. Meanwhile, miscellaneous music theory tidbits will start to gel and make sense.

No one learned to juggle by starting with 5 balls in the air at once. (I switched analogies here – sorry.)

Keep up the good work and tend to those seeds.

It’s About Time – a story about music notation.

One night, while teaching my class, a student was confused about the types of notes I was referring to: quarter notes, whole notes, etc. To answer her questions, I wrote a story – an imaginary story – of how music notation came to be. I hope you enjoy it.

 

It’s About Time
Once upon a time in a land far, far away, there lived a man called The Time Keeper, or The Keeper, as he was commonly known. The Keeper noticed the sounds of nature and of the villagers walking to and fro. The rhythms they created fascinated him. A very creative and innovative person, he thought about how he might create a language with which he could notate the various rhythms he observed. Being able to write down and diagram rhythmic patterns and the pulses of nature would enable him to archive, share, and reproduce them.

One day while on a stroll, The Keeper noticed how simple the act of walking was: left, right, left, right… He got out his sketchpad and drew a line that looked like a leg and at the bottom of that line he drew a foot. He would use that symbol each time he took a step, and before long he had filled the entire page with these symbols. The Keeper realized that it would be difficult to keep track of all those steps, as the symbols all looked the same and they went on and on with out any simple way to count them. Perhaps they could be grouped together in some way to make it easier to track them.

“Left, right…” the Keeper said to himself. “There is a grouping I could use.”

So, every two steps the Keeper made a vertical bar to separate the steps. That helped, but still seemed like a lot to keep track of.

“What if I doubled that, and grouped my footsteps into fours?” he wondered. “Left, right, left, right… Yes, that would do quite well.”

So, the Keeper made a vertical mark every four steps. He called it a bar. (He also simplified his foot symbol to being simply a vertical line with a solid oblong oval at the bottom where the foot used to be.)

“What shall I name those four steps grouped together?” he wondered. “I have it! I shall call it a measure.”

As the Keeper went on to think about all this, he realized that he would be noting all types of sounds and rhythms besides footsteps. He decided that he would call those “lines with legs” by a new name: notes. Since there were four of them in each measure; each representing a quarter of that whole measure, he would call them quarter notes.

Soon he realized that other sounds and rhythms he heard often lasted longer than the length of one footstep: often twice the length, while others moved by much faster. So, he created half notes, which were twice the length of a quarter note, and the whole note, which represented the length of four quarter notes. The half note looked just like the quarter note, but he left the oblong oval hollow, instead of filling it in. For the whole note, he decided to leave the hollow oval, but to remove the stem/leg.

He also realized that many sounds happened more often; sometimes twice as often as a single quarter note. To notate those sounds, The Keeper  divided each quarter into two parts: one for the initial downstep of his quarter note (that initially represented his footsteps) and another for the upstep. Since there would be eight  of these in a measure, he called them eighth notes.  Rather than creating a new symbol for these faster notes, he simply added a little flag at the top of the stem of the note. If needed, he could even divide those farther, creating sixteenth notes (two flags,) and even thirty-second notes (three flags.)

“Wow,” he exclaimed. “I have now created a system where I can notate the durations of any rhythmic pattern I encounter.”

And then he rested.

He sat down by the side of the path he had been walking on, and listened; hoping to hear something exciting he could notate with his new set of musical symbols.

Amid the chattering of the birds, and the footsteps of passersby, he observed that there were often times when there was no sound at all.

“Hmmmm,” he thought. “It seems that certain sounds are resting, much like I am. I will need to create some symbols that can represent these empty spaces. I shall call them rests.”

For the quarter note rest, he drew a squiggly line that looked somewhat like a broken leg. For the eighth note rest, he made a vertical line with a flag, (somewhat like the eighth note,) but left the oval off. For the sixteenth note rest, he did similarly; leaving the oval off, but adding two flags. For some unknown reason, he made the half note rest look a little like a hat: a line with a rectangle on top, and for the whole note rest, he turned that hat upside down.

Now he could resume his work: to observe, listen, and notate all the interesting rhythms he wanted to remember.


Well, that’s odd…

The Keeper continued his work of listening and notating the various sounds and rhythms he heard. The sounds of certain machines and the clip-clop of passing horses all seemed to easily fit into the system he created that was based on a measure of four quarter notes. But occasionally he would hear patterns of sounds that felt more natural to count them in groups of five, as the patterns just didn’t line up as well in groups of four.

“This presents a problem,” he thought to himself. “Will counting in ‘five’ mean that I have to create all new notes and rests? That could be quite cumbersome having two sets of fractional divisions, and as I discovered this new grouping of five, I would suspect that there are other odd groupings yet to be found as well.”

The Keeper paced to and fro, pondering this dilemma. As he walked, he realized that even as he walked left, right, left, right – he could still use his footsteps as units of measurement – he would simply be counting “in five” instead of “in four.” He could continue to use all the same names and values as before, after all – four quarter notes would still equal a whole note. The math was still applicable as long as he indicated how each measure was to be counted: a signature of sorts that would direct the reader.

“I will write one number that will indicate how many beats I am grouping into each measure, and then another number to remind myself of which value I am using to count with,” he said.

So, the Keeper invented the time signature and put it at the beginning of each rhythmic pattern he notated. It looked like a fraction; one number on top of the other, with a slash between the two. The upper number notated the number of beats, and the lower represented the note value used to count.

Soon his notebook was filled with rhythms of all sorts. As predicted, he discovered that some patterns were best counted in other time signatures. Some worked best in “seven,” while others were in “nine.” Some patterns seemed to repeat between steps, causing The Keeper to think of using the “eighth notes” as the unit of measurement.

Soon he invented the triplet, which was a way of counting three notes in one beat, and all sorts of shorthand symbols he could use when wanting to communicate repeated measures, or entire passages.

He began creating his own rhythms and compositions; writing page after page of notes and rests. Changing time signatures midway wouldn’t be a problem as long as he made note of the change, and soon others in the land learned to read and write this new language. To see many villagers gathering together to perform these rhythmic pieces was not uncommon.

A new way to communicate was created and all was good.

The End.

Or is it?

Stay tuned for the next chapter when The Keeper met meets his new wife to be: Melody.