Ukulele meetup – 10 August 2017

I would like to invite you to a ukulele meetup on Thursday, 10 August 2017, starting at 5:30 p.m. – arriving later is fine – in Budapest, very close to Puskás Ferenc Stadium. The exact address is Kerepesi út 26. We will finish at around 8:00-8:30 p.m., or earlier if everyone leaves, and later if we feel like staying.

Participation fee: HUF 500.

Food and drinks may not be brought in, but they can be purchased at the venue.

IMPORTANT: advance registration is required. I kindly ask everyone interested to indicate that they intend to attend via the Contact page. If possible, please also tell me your age – this is optional – and write a few words about roughly what level you play at and what you would like to learn. Complete beginners are very welcome! I am not preparing a fixed programme, apart from a few songs mentioned below. I think it is perfectly fine if the first meetup develops completely spontaneously. I would, however, like participants to agree with the following principles:

• bring your own ukulele; we cannot provide instruments to borrow
• please do not bring other instruments; this afternoon is about the ukulele and learning to play the ukulele
• I assume everyone's own ukulele is precious to them, so please do not be offended if somebody does not want you to try their instrument
• the meetup is not a ukulele concert or musical evening; its purpose is for us to sit in smaller and larger groups and teach one another
• bring a tablet or phone – Wi-Fi is available – in case we need to look up a chord progression or tablature

What you can expect from me, or ask me to help with:

Since the Hungaria Ukulele Blog began, I have made a great many tutorial videos. If you have questions about any of them, or would like to learn a song shown in one of the videos, I will gladly demonstrate and explain it – if I can still remember it . I have also recently been polishing solo-ukulele arrangements of several songs, and I would be happy to teach these as well: Eric Clapton – Tears in Heaven, Eric Clapton – Wonderful Tonight, Luis Demetrio: Sway, Simon & Garfunkel: Sound of Silence, The Beatles: Let It Be, She Loves You, Something and Yesterday. I also recommend theDownloadssection; we can learn any of the songs available there together. Besides that, we can work on chords, picking and strumming techniques, and perhaps some music theory. Please be sure to tell me what you would be interested in!

You can also count on me to collect the participation fee, so please find me when you arrive.

UPDATE:

Thank you for all the registrations so far – and I am still happy to receive more. Fortunately, a few arrive every day.

Several people have indicated that they would attend as complete or near-complete beginners. With them in mind, I came up with the following idea: prepare a list of five to ten favourite songs, either in your head or written down. We can choose a few of them and I will show you step by step how to create a ukulele accompaniment for a song on your own. The point is that by working through one particular song, you learn the method for accompanying songs on ukulele in general – provided, of course, that there is interest in doing this.

If anyone else would also like to share their knowledge with others, please write a few words about it via theContactpage. If you already have specific songs in mind that you would like to teach, send those as well and I will update this post so that people who want to learn can see which songs they can expect.

WE WARMLY WELCOME EVERY UKULELE PLAYER!

A few photos of the venue – I had not yet visited it in person when writing this: