Happy 10th Birthday, Hungarian Ukulele Blog!

Dear Ukulele Players!

Fasten your seat belts — this is going to be a long blog post!

December 30, 2010 was an important date in my life. It is one of the relatively few dates I can actually remember without looking it up . That was the day I published the first blog poston the blog.hu platform. Exactly ten years have passed since then, yet the goal I wrote in the very first sentence of that first post has not changed at all: "My goal in creating the Hungaria Ukulele Blog is to introduce this wonderful little instrument to as many people as possible and inspire them to start playing the ukulele."

Over the years, around December 30 I have sometimes written longer and sometimes shorter reflections on the previous year. This occasion is unusual because I want to look back not on one year but on ten, and I will also reveal a few behind-the-scenes details. First, the most important personal development: since the blog began, my two children have been born. Every day they have the joy (?) of hearing me strum more or less continuously . I hope they too will enthusiastically pick up a ukulele once they are a little older .

When I started the blog in 2010, I wanted to use the address ukulele.blog.hu, but it was already taken, so I came up with uksi.blog.hu instead. The nickname "uksi" somehow stuck with many people — although some did not like it — and it seems to have become the Hungarian equivalent of the English nickname "uke". So for quite a while the blog lived at uksi.blog.hu, until the blog.hu administrators kindly gave me the ukulele.blog.hu address. My greatest wish, of course, was to have the blog at the ukulele.hu domain, but that domain had already been registered as well, although it was not actually being used. About two years of persistent correspondence — with breaks of several months — plus a little luck eventually led to me acquiring the ukulele.hu domain in the middle of 2014. That was followed by roughly nine months of work. A fellow ukulele player gave me an excellent design for the site's visual identity (thanks, Sanyi!), which I have changed only minimally since, and I began programming the website. In spring 2015, ukulele.hu launched in essentially the form you still see today. Back then we did not organize ukulele meetups or courses and had no webshop, so the site could afford to look a little more spacious. Since then the amount of information and content has grown steadily and — I admit — the site may have become a little crowded, so redesigning it is a project for the future...

At first I recorded the videos with a Sony camera, one of the models that could already record to internal memory. Naturally the image quality was nowhere near as good. You can see in the old material that it is not nearly as sharp as videos made on a phone in more recent years. I look at those early videos critically and can see what I have improved since then and what I would do differently today, but I decided not to delete them. They are now part of the history. I may eventually revisit certain topics or songs from a different perspective and with a different approach. Returning to the technical side: for a long time I did not have a proper solution for recording audio, but since 2019 I have fortunately been able to work with a very good "home studio microphone" and its accompanying audio interface. Of course you could spend unlimited amounts of money making a home mini-studio better and better — lighting, professional camera, an even better microphone and so on — but all that can wait.From the very beginning, I enjoyed making videos. At first it felt extremely strange to watch and listen to myself when it came time to edit them. By now, of course, I have become used to my own voice and I know what to pay attention to when recording. I make mistakes quite often, and sometimes I simply cannot get into the flow of what I want to say. At those moments I grumble for a while — which, naturally, the camera records — and then I have a good laugh at myself later during editing. So making the videos entertains me too, but I hope the final result — the finished videos that appear in the blog posts — is useful as well.

Before anyone gets the impression that I receive only positive feedback, the full picture also includes messages that contain more or less subtle negative criticism, although fortunately these are very rare. If the criticism is constructive, I always thank the person for it and consider what I can use from it. Obviously I cannot satisfy everyone or every possible expectation, but naturally I try to make the blog and ukulele.hu as a whole as good as I possibly can.

On February 1, 2019, I launched Ukulele Hungary accounts on Instagram and Twitter. To be honest, I do not use those social platforms as actively as Facebook, but material does appear there from time to time. In any case, I have to keep up with trends even when it feels painful — I still do not know whether I should finally surrender to TikTok . I am happy that the Ukulele Hungary Facebook page has more than 1,500 followers, while the Magyar Ukulele Klub Facebook groupis slowly approaching 1,100 members.

As for the blog's mission, I believe the goal I set in 2010 has been achieved — or rather, I am continuously achieving it. There are more and more of us ukulele players in Hungary, and I receive feedback from many directions saying that the blog posts have provided inspiration, information and practical help, from choosing a ukulele through individual steps in learning the instrument all the way to learning particular songs. I am especially happy that you, dear readers, are my partners in this. More and more of you write to tell me that after the blog helped you learn ukulele and you demonstrated your new skills, family members and friends became interested too. So more and more of you are spreading the message. It is an additional pleasure when I infect people I meet every day with a love of the ukulele. Three of my colleagues have begun their own ukulele "careers", including my friend Gyuri, with whom I founded a ukulele duo calledKeskeny Megálló . We try to keep expanding our repertoire, and you may have heard us at ukulele meetups and courses.

Speaking of meetups: if I remember correctly, perhaps two or three years after the blog began we held a mini ukulele meetup where four or five of us got together and played a few songs. We have been organizing proper ukulele meetups in a relatively standard format for about three years now — although I always try to bring you something new — and we usually have an increasing number of both new and returning participants. Because of the pandemic, this year we were able to hold only one ukulele meetup, in the summer, on August 11, and unfortunately I do not know when the next one will be possible. I had wanted to organize an autumn meetup too, and I had a secret plan: to throw a huge ukulele party and celebrate the Hungaria Ukulele Blog's 10th birthday properly. As soon as circumstances allow, I absolutely want to make up for it, and I hope that you, my dear ukulele-playing readers, will come to the birthday meetup sometime in 2021. I always look forward to these events enormously, because meeting you is a joy. It is wonderful to see that you love doing the same thing I do: strumming this little four-stringed instrument that brings love and happiness both to the person playing it and to the person listening.

Because of the pandemic, in the spring I organized severalvirtual meetupson Facebook, and at each one I tried either to teach a song or explore a particular topic. Naturally, the experience is nowhere near as intense as a "real" ukulele meetup, because there is no direct interaction with you. Because of the Facebook stream, I see your reactions with about a 40-second delay, and even then only in writing. During the past month or month and a half we have also been meeting on Zoom in groups of varying sizes, giving members of the Hungaria ukulele community a chance to get to know one another. The blog posts have actually led to many personal acquaintances and even more virtual ones — conversations and friendships formed online. It is genuinely uplifting to talk with people who think similarly about music, learning music and teaching it (Orsi ), and it is always an honor when someone replies during a conversation, "Yes, I know — I read it on your blog."

The pandemic also disrupted the ukulele coursesthat I launched in 2019 and that, much to my delight, many of you signed up for. I can confidently say that every course went well and everyone went home richer in experiences. For me it is an enormous privilege to be able to pass on the knowledge I have acquired, and while teaching I get to know your personalities very quickly and at very close range — perhaps more than you realize . I recently wrote about this in a blog post called "This Is How You Play Ukulele", which received an unusually large amount of positive feedback. Thank you very much! Someone once asked me which of my own blog posts I feel turned out best, and which received the most praise. Well, this is one of them. In addition, I thinkthe year's most successful online production was our shared Christmas performance of "Ó, Gyönyörű Szép" , both played and sung together. I would once again like to thank everyone who sent in videos, and thank you for the countless kind words received on Facebook and by email. I could even call this small project historic, because as far as I know we were the first in Hungary to make something like this — and I am equally sure it will not be the last . Finally, I would mention one more post that I think turned out particularly well, even though when I pressed the record button I had no idea what would come of it. Its title is: How to Arrange Songs Yourself.

Returning to ukulele courses: naturally there will be more in Budapest, but I have also received several enquiries from towns elsewhere in Hungary asking whether I would be willing to teach courses there. My answer is an emphatic yes. I am very grateful for these invitations. To organize courses outside Budapest, however, I ask for active help from the people who have contacted me from the various towns. From 2021 onward I would therefore like to take this wonderful instrument and the course to other parts of Hungary as well.

So we can look back on a busy and eventful year — one that could have been even busier, more eventful and even more full of ukulele if it had not been for that blasted COVID... As far as ukulele.hu is concerned, I carried out the most substantial development since the site's launch during this summer and autumn. I had been thinking about creating a webshop for some time, and this summer the idea finally matured enough for me to act on it. I began negotiations with Hungarian and foreign partners while also starting development of the webshop itself. Those negotiations plus about three months of development resulted in the webshop that opened on October 1 this year, and I am proud that you can choose from such a large selection of ukuleles.

When I began writing this blog post, I wondered what image I could use as an illustration. The idea came quickly: I would show you a behind-the-scenes raw photograph that became the source material for the small image that has accompanied me since the beginning of the blog and that I use everywhere as an icon or avatar:

I took this photo in December 2010 at the workplace I had at the time. It shows the first ukulele of my life, a Lanikai CK-C. During the past ten years I have changed jobs three times, and at every workplace I tried to spread the message — the love of the ukulele. Since we are talking numbers: I have no statistics from the blog.hu years, but since ukulele.hu launched I have used Google Analytics. It shows that from the end of May 2015 until today the website has received more than 540,000 page views. Dividing that by the number of days since then does not produce such a spectacular figure — an average of about 270 page views per day — but it still felt very good to write down that big total . A few more numbers, because you sometimes ask me about these: my collection currently contains ten ukuleles. At first I worked for quite a long time with my single concert-size Lanikai, and then the family began to grow. Honestly, I do not even remember which instrument was my second ukulele, but here is the full collection: the concert Lanikai; Lanikai QM-BLCET (tenor, my number-one instrument, and I wrote about it exactly one year ago); Kala resonator (tenor); Kala eight-string (tenor); Ortega Tiger (tenor); Koki'o tenor with a solid spruce top (I cannot remember the model number); Baton Rouge V4-TCE (tenor); GoldTone banjolele (tenor); Koki'o mini (sopranino); and finally a beautiful Hungarian custom-built baritone that I received for my birthday a few years ago. Of course, being as hopelessly ukulele-infected as I am, I can already see future additions to the collection in my mind even though the current instruments barely fit in the apartment ... not to mention the financial side of things, because the ukuleles I have my eye on are not exactly cheap. Back to the statistics: among the blog categories, "Arranged Songs" is the most popular, yet this year it happened to be the category with the fewest new posts. So in 2021 I intend to focus more strongly on it and would like to publish videos of even more song arrangements. Without false modesty, I am proud of this year's arrangements. I adapted one of my favorite pieces, which I have played on piano for more than thirty years, for ukulele — Scott Joplin — The Entertainer — and its "how to play it" tutorial holds a record in the history of the blog at 47 and a half minutes. I think the arrangement of Hull a Pelyhes also turned out well, and I would likewise count the blog post and video made for the already mentioned Ó, Gyönyörű Szép among this year's successful projects.

I already know that as soon as I publish this post, a whole pile of things I forgot to write down or tell you will immediately come to mind. I comfort myself with the thought that at least this leaves something to remember and write about a year from now.

And what will the next ten — or more — years spent playing ukulele look like? Naturally I have plans and ideas, although obviously only for the relatively near future. Ten years ago I could not possibly have predicted where things would stand today either. ButI feel that I did everything I could to make the past decade a good one, and perhaps it is not an exaggeration to say I could hardly have dreamed of anything better. I would like to be able to say the same thing ten years from now.

Dear Readers, Dear Ukulele Players!

Thank you for these wonderful years. I hope you will stay with me in the years ahead, keep reading the blog, watching the videos, and that there will be more and more of you. Or rather, more and more of us. I wish you a happy new year filled with music, strumming and singing. See you in 2021 — and I hope finally in person as well . If you have any thoughts, suggestions or ideas about the website, the blog or ukulele playing, do not wait: grab a keyboard and write to me!

Finally, I would like to thank my family for their support and patience. I admit it cannot always be pleasant to listen while I work out a new song — hesitant strumming, hunting for chords — or to hear the same chord progressions for the hundredth time while I maintain my repertoire. But I think all of us are compensated when, in the evening while putting the children to bed, I play Brahms's Lullaby . So the final thought of this blog post is my thank-you to them .