Four Strings, Five Years

Dear Ukulele Players!

Please allow me a little nostalgia in this year's final blog post, because exactly five years ago, on 30 December 2010, the Hungaria Ukulele Blog was launched. Happy fifth birthday! Five years may not be long enough for truly monumental nostalgia, but it is still a milestone for me: when you open www.ukulele.hu, you are looking at the result of half a decade of work filled with events.

How did the whole thing begin? The decision and the idea simply appeared; I do not even know where from. Perhaps I thought that if this little instrument brought me so much joy, I should try to popularise it so that as many people as possible could experience the pleasure of making music. I searched online and found no Hungarian blog... After that I only needed to register a name. Anyone who has been playing ukulele for only a few months may not know that for more than four years blog.hu was our home, and the posts and videos were available at uksi.blog.hu. What is this name “uksi”? When I wanted to register ukulele.blog.hu, that address was unfortunately already taken. Later, thanks to the blog.hu administrators, we eventually received ukulele.blog.hu sometime in 2013. So at first I invented a nickname for the ukulele, and that is how “uksi” was placed before blog.hu. I received feedback saying that I was no language reformer: what was this “uksi” nonsense when the instrument was called a ukulele? True enough, but for the reasons above the blog needed a name. Somehow the word uksi then stuck in the vocabulary of my dear readers, and a great many people now use it affectionately in speech and writing. Perhaps linguists will one day cite “uksi” as a fine example of twenty-first-century Hungarian word creation. In any case, it is surely better than if I had invented something equivalent to “four-stringological pluckery”.

Returning to the early years, among the first posts was the Let It Be tutorial videowhich remains one of the most popular posts. At the moment I am writing this, the video has 128,917 views and has been shared on numerous foreign sites, even though I chatter away in Hungarian on it — although an English subtitle track has since been added. Apart from Let It Be, more than thirty songs have received either a proper tutorial video or a somewhat funnier or more unusual arrangement, such as I Feel Fine played with my twin brothers, or What's Up. In future I would like to make many more tutorial videos, but you know how it is: lack of time makes it anything but simple. Anyone who has made similar videos knows how much work goes into each one. Recording myself playing the song is only the beginning; afterwards the footage has to be edited, subtitles added, the video rendered and uploaded to YouTube, and then a post has to be written for it. So it cannot be done from one moment to the next .

I have written many posts intended to inspire my dear readers to learn the ukulele. These appear in the panel on the right under “I don't have a ukulele yet!”. One of the most popular of them — although not directly about the ukulele — was entitledOn Listening to Musicand was even featured on the index.hu homepage.

I also wrote quite a few posts about choosing and buying ukuleles, and these too are among the most-read entries. One particular pleasure over the past few years has been getting my hands on and trying an enormous variety of ukuleles. Almost without exception I was sorry to return them after testing. There is no helping it: the collecting instinct wakes quickly in ukulele players .

Ukuleles waiting to be tested

I have also tried to create posts and videos explaining step by step how I think it is worth beginning to learn the ukulele, so that people who have never held an instrument — let alone a ukulele — can get started as well. These videos are collected in the list on the right under “I already have a ukulele!”.

I know the articles and videos are not perfect, and naturally nothing written or said in them is holy scripture. I wanted one thing then and still want it now: to pass on and share a great deal of information so that the love and joy of the “common language of humanity” — goodness, what grand words! — MUSIC and MAKING MUSIC, and the learning connected with them, reach as many readers as possible and “infect” you with the feeling: “I have to try this too!”

I would like to thank my family for their patience and for putting up with my absence so often while I was filming an “uksi video”, editing a video or post, or typing away at the program code of ukulele.hu. I also thank Virág for her generous help when she prepared translations for the English version of the blog, ukenplay.blogspot.com. Unfortunately that English-blog project died; I simply did not have enough time for it. Thanks also to Joe, who always had the answer even to the most outrageous programming problems whenever I had a question while developing ukulele.hu. And enormous thanks to Sanyi for the wonderful design you can see on ukulele.hu at this very moment.

I am glad that through the blog I have met many people who also love the ukulele. That is how I met Mike and Neil, who, when visiting Hungary from Portland, Oregon, considered it important not only to see the sights of our country but also to find a fellow ukulele player here.

My immeasurable thanks to you too, dear readers. From the statistics I know how many of you read the blog and the website, so I know that my work is not a voice crying in the wilderness. Special thanks to everyone who has sent any feedback on Facebook or by email — most often lines of thanks!!! — because you have both warmed my heart and helped make the blog and website better. Thank you as well to the Facebook community for the more than 700 likes accumulated by now — exactly 720 today.

Finally, I have to tell you that with my daughter, who was born last year and turned nineteen months old two days ago, we play ukulele almost every day. This generally consists of me playing a song while she either dances or comes over and gently brushes the four strings. It seems to me that she greatly enjoys our family singing and music-making together, and of course she can already say:

Naturally she does not say it only when prompted. Recently she saw a string quartet, her face lit up and she simply said “ukulele” .

I wish everyone a very happy New Year filled with ukulele playing!