Ukulele Crash Course for Complete Beginners

After giving different kinds of ukulele workshops in Massachusetts, I’ve decided to offer a crash course for those beginners eager to participate in the ukulele scene that’s spreading across the world like wild fire. For time-challenged adults, it’s about making time to get a 1.5 hour dose of instruction in a group setting.

[Related entry: for the absolute, complete, total beginner in ukulele]

Romero Creations Tiny Tenor and XS Soprano

• Crash Course for Complete Beginners
• Crash Course for Total Beginners
• Workshop for the Do-It-Yourself Beginner
• Refresher Course for Beginners

With the power of search engines and the lure of freebies on the Internet, it’s tempting to teach yourself how to play by watching Youtube tutorials and read how-to articles. Just about every aspect of ukulele playing is covered, if you search hard enough. Why don’t more people teach themselves how to play?

If you try to teach yourself, you might get frustrated or develop bad habits (that are hard to break or even physically hurt you to stop playing). I taught myself and then took a 16-week class (twice a week, 1 hour 15 minutes each session). Over time, I’ve taken workshops, researched books, designed and developed my own courses and instructional material. What I’ve learned is that you need a lot of self discipline to teach yourself.

When you learn in a group setting, you see what others are doing. You become aware of what you’re doing right or wrong. You learn much more quickly than if you’re to teach yourself or in a private individual lesson.

Learning requires not only absorbing new material (terminology, concepts, skills, etc) but also re-enforcing what you’ve learned so that it sticks. This is where practice comes in. You can’t expect to digest what you’ve eaten without investing the time to do so.

Initially I set up the weekly ukulele jam sessions in Historic Lower Mills to be preceded by workshops. The jam sessions are free but the workshops are not. Because of the time of day (the jammers don’t want to start late and end late and the workshop participants can’t get here earlier), I decided to cancel all workshops and focus only on organising jam sessions at 7 pm.

Recent enquiries compelled me to offer a one-off crash course for beginners to precede a jam session on three-chord songs. Workshop participants get the benefit of staying to practice switching between three primary chords that they will learn in the workshop. If there’s sufficient interest, I may offer a sequel. All ukulele players need to get their strumming to what-I-call an automatic level.

What you will learn in the crash course:

1. How to tune your instrument
2. How to hold it comfortably sitting down and standing up
3. How to create a nice tone
4. Basic strumming patterns
5. Three primary chords to get you started on playing in a “jam session”
6. Other tips and advice