Merry Christmas, dear Ukulele Players!

Dear Ukulele Players!

Today we lit the fourth candle on the Advent wreath ... As the end of the year approaches, I usually write a shorter or longer post looking back on the year. Please allow me to do the same again this year.

Several of you have asked when there will be another community production, but unfortunately there definitely will not be another one this year. At the beginning of next year we can tackle a new arrangement — I already have several songs in mind. If you missed the 2021 community productions, or do not know what I mean, I recommend the blog posts marked with the “play together” tag. After last year's highly successful arrangement of “Ó, gyönyörűszép”, we arranged two songs at the beginning of this year, and I think both turned out really well.

I hope you have grown to like the new look of ukulele.hu, which has been welcoming visitors since the final day of March this year. My aim with the redesign was to make the constantly increasing amount of information easier to navigate and help you find the topics that interest you. I also continued developing the webshop that had been operating since the previous autumn. So far in 2021 I have written 48 blog posts: there was an interview, many instrument demonstrations, I tried to publish more song arrangements than in earlier years, and several posts were also written about the courses.

I would especially like to thank you for all your ukulele activity this year. Although I only have exact numbers for some things, I still feel that this has been my busiest ukulele year so far. I would highlight the wonderfully atmospheric ukulele meetup held in September. I receive a record number of emails about the ukulele courses— we held four of them in 2021 — and more of you attended them this year than ever before. I hope you came away with positive experiences. It was a particular honour that people travelled from outside Hungary to attend my courses as well. My inbox is already filling with messages asking about the next dates. As soon as the next courses are announced, I will notify everyone. This year I also helpeda great many beginner ukulele players with choosing a ukulele, while the students who attended my individual online lessons also practised diligently and made very good progress.

Teaching the people who attend my individual online lessons gives me a huge amount of energy. It is wonderful to see your progress from week to week, and genuinely uplifting to get to know your personalities through music: to see how you hold the ukulele, how you pluck the strings, to share the joy of a success, a new chord or a new melodic turn, and also to see something that did not work — or was still awkward — the week before become clean and begin to settle into place. I have one beginner student who threw themselves into ukulele playing with fantastic enthusiasm. I did everything I could to demonstrate correct ukulele posture through a webcam, which is not exactly an easy trick , but in the end we managed it. And of course we began getting to know chords and the challenges of changing between them. I would also like to mention an intermediate student with whom I had lessons some time ago. They approached the lessons with such persistence and curiosity, and took such diligent notes, that rapid progress was never really in doubt. I wonder where they are now and what they are playing. Finally, a few words about an advanced student: it is a joy in itself to teach a ukulele player whose musical taste is similar to mine. What is almost unbelievable is how quickly we devour fingerstyle arrangements from lesson to lesson. This student memorises complicated solo-ukulele arrangements at an astonishing pace and is not far away from creating a complete arrangement independently. I wonder whether my three students will recognise themselves . Meanwhile, whatever level the person I am teaching may be at, you show me who you are through your playing, and that is an uplifting experience. Thank you. Because I can see and hear that this is how you play the ukulele. I am serious: psychologists should go and teach music — they might be able to do their work much more effectively that way .

Thanks to the ukulele I have also met people whom I would probably never have encountered otherwise. One of them lives almost 200 kilometres from me, but thanks to the internet we were often able to talk about ukulele arrangements, the community productions, and sometimes even the harder questions of life. From time to time they sent me one of their own song arrangements and we discussed how it might be improved; I also showed them some of my fingerstyle arrangements while they were still in an early stage. I hope this person is reading these lines, because I would like to say how good it is to see and hear in their videos the musicianship, mature clarity, natural momentum and kindness that unmistakably comes through in their playing.

I will close with this: we are living through troubled times. There is hardly a family that has not been affected by the COVID pandemic, and it casts a shadow over everyday life. I cannot describe how much I look forward to the time when all of this is only a terribly painful — and sadly indelible — memory, but at least no longer hangs over our heads every day of the week, everywhere: in the streets, shops, schools and workplaces. Music helps enormously in getting through this period. Listening to music and making music — on whatever instrument — help us keep our inner world clear and give us something to hold on to even when a situation seems hopeless.

There are still 12 days left in the year, and there may yet be one or two more blog posts, but I would already like to wish you a Merry Christmas and, for the coming year, in addition to lots and lots of ukulele playing, good health and happiness to every one of you. Take care of yourselves and one another.