52 To Do

I wanted to put together a few videos of my ukulele playing but I’m heading to the airport to fly home in a few and don’t have time to pull it off. I will include one in my monthly summary; a promise.

I love the ukulele! In just a week I bought one, learned a few chords and have learned 4 songs so far. “You Are My Sunshine”, “Tonight You Belong to Me”, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “Ode to Joy”. Even though you could play just about any song on the ukulele, it seems like ukuleles go best with the “happy songs” out there. I won’t lie, it’s hard to be in a bad mood when you’re humming along to these songs.

You will inevitably find different tabs & chords for just about any song out there, but I went with some fairly simple ones. I really enjoyed the youtube videos by “Ukulele Mike” and the resources on ukulelehunt.com and ukulele-tabs.com.

Playing a musical instrument is something I’ve just never really gotten around to. It’s one of those things that always seems like it’s going to be pretty expensive and time consuming. The great thing about the ukulele is that it’s not pretentious like a lot of other instruments can be to learn. You aren’t going to run into stuffy teachers online. In fact, I would argue the ukulele community is probably one of the strongest and funnest groups out there. Just check out the Portland Ukulele Project:

If you’ve always wanted to learn an instrument and just haven’t had the courage, like me, to do so, I encourage you to give the ukulele a shot. It’s even gotten me singing a tune or two which is a huge accomplishment.