Learn to play ukulele
45 posts
Mastering chord changes!
Tamás GállOver the past few years I have had the good fortune to teach ukulele, among other things, to a number of enthusiastic beginners. Unfortunately I have never had enough time to teach more people, but the experience has been extremely instructive for me as well. Different people find different parts of…
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Latin Tunes in the Forest
Tamás GállI love Latin music. I can listen to - and watch - its magical, emotion-filled songs and dances for hours. There are countless styles within it, and I think everyone can find a branch of Latin music that appeals to them. To whet your appetite, here is a video in which the guitarist plays some "Spanis…
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Let's Get in Tune! — How to Tune a Ukulele
Tamás GállThis post is about the practical details of tuning a ukulele. Because many people asked me to explain tuning in greater detail — and because tuning really can be difficult for beginners — I decided to devote the first tutorial video to tuning. UPDATE (10 May 2019): The video above was made more than…
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How to Restring a Ukulele
Tamás GállThis restringing video arrived very late compared with the launch of the blog — you only had to wait about nine and a half years for it. One reason is that, slightly embarrassingly, I do not have a huge amount of experience restringing ukuleles. The other is that I am one of those people who do not…
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For New Ukulele Owners II - Your First Chords
Tamás GállI could just as well have called this post "the first steps", because learning to fret and sound chords is when the little masterpiece we call a ukulele truly becomes a musical instrument in our hands. Learning chords is a long process. Week after week and month after month we will encounter new one…
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For New Ukulele Owners I - Holding and Strumming the Instrument
Tamás GállSince the blog began I have received many kind and complimentary messages (thankyouthankyouthankyou!), and at least as many questions, mainly from beginners who find the first obstacles in learning the ukulele difficult to overcome. With them in mind I made a two-part summary video that helps you ge…
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Eight Tips for Beginners
Tamás GállBased on the experience of many, many years, I have collected a few thoughts that I would like to share with you in a slightly unusual video. It is unusual because this time you will hear only a few random chords — in other words, we are not learning a song — and I will be talking even more than usu…
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Chords 22: B7
Tamás GállIf you happened to miss the blog post about B majorplease read it. At the beginning I summarize the basic things you need to know about barre chords, which I will not repeat here. The barre version of B7 differs from B major in that you do not need to place your ring finger on the fourth fret of the…
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Chords 21: B Minor
Tamás GállIf you happened to skip the blog post about B major, please read it. At the beginning of that post I summarize the basic things you need to know about barre chords, so I will not repeat them here. B minor differs from B major in that you do not need to place your middle finger on the third fret of t…
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Chords 20: B Major
Tamás GállAfter many chord-learning videos, we have reached a real milestone: this is the first barre chord we learn. A barre chord means using one finger — usually the index finger — to fret all four strings at once (or two or three strings in the case of a partial barre), while the remaining strings are fre…
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Chords 19: F7
Tamás GállF7 can be derived from two other chords in two different ways. The most logical starting point is probably F major, because we add only one note: place the ring finger on the third fret of the third string, giving us an Eb. If we want to find a relative in terms of the fingering shape, think of G mi…
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Chords 18: E7
Tamás GállE7 is a genuinely beautiful chord. It sounds excellent on the ukulele, and although the fingering may look strange the first time, the second attempt will already feel much easier. Compared with our usual hand position, we need to rotate the hand slightly. Turn the back of the hand a little toward t…
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