Singing and Playing the Ukulele

The title could just as well be "Singing and Playing an Instrument", because it makes almost no difference which instrument we pick up: we can run into the same difficulty when we try to sing and play at the same time (wind instruments excepted ). This is no magic trick either, and of course it can be improved with practice, yet at first many people still believe it is an impossible obstacle . It is not. I am no neuroscientist, but my impression is that instrumental playing and speech or singing recruit similar — partly the same — areas of the brain. That may be why someone trying for the first time to sing over the chords they are strumming can feel a certain disturbance in the Force. It is a strangely tingling sensation, but once we discover how to do both things at once, it becomes completely natural, and we cannot understand why it ever seemed impossible. We have to keep persistently challenging the part of our brain that initially insists it can pay attention to only one task , deliberately tangling our fingers or shutting our mouth. I have partly overcome this effect myself. For example, I cannot really speak — or only with difficulty and in a rather strange way — while playing piano or ukulele, but I can sing. Perhaps speaking would work too if I practiced it; I simply practiced singing instead.

Before we start practicing how to accompany our singing with chords, it is worth keeping a few things in mind. Choose a song whose chords you can already play confidently, without having to concentrate desperately on each change, because if the chord changes fall apart, the whole performance will fall apart with them. It does not matter if you do not know the lyrics — I often struggle with those myself — but the melody should already be in your ear. At first it is enough simply to hum it or sing "la-la-la". The important thing is not to lose the chord accompaniment and to be able to reproduce the melody somehow. If you can then do the same thing with the lyrics... well, you are there. In the next video I would like to give a few tips to those who are still at the beginning of this journey and want to combine their ukulele chord playing with singing. Happy strumming and singing to everyone .