We Made Music Together for World Ukulele Day

One week and one day ago, I asked you, dear ukulele players, to help celebrate World Ukulele Day together. I asked you to strum a total of 48 measures and, of course, record yourselves doing it. The past week was full of suspense as I kept watching my inbox... and not without reason. Slowly, your recordings began arriving from all over: from Püspökladány to Szombathely, and even from Vienna! The submission period was quite short, yet some wonderfully enthusiastic ukulele players still managed to send me flawless performances within that time.

Just like last year's "Ó, Gyönyörű Szép" project, I edited your submitted videos together so that our virtual Hungaria ukulele orchestra could come to life once again.

What was different between the two projects? First of all, this time I did not tell anyone what song you were accompanying. I sent the YouTube link to everyone appearing in the video for a private pre-premiere viewing, and one colleague summed up the challenge perfectly in her reply: "It was a little difficult to get into the right feeling for the chords when I had no idea whether I was accompanying an AC/DC song or a kindergarten song."

The second difference was the quality of the submitted videos. With Ó, Gyönyörű Szép, I spent quite a while fiddling with the audio tracks before getting them synchronized. This time, however — and I am not exaggerating — you sent genuinely flawless material. In only one place did I need to shift the audio by a few tenths of a second (you can see this in the third track to the left of the blue vertical line in the picture below). Otherwise I simply stacked the audio tracks on top of one another and the ukulele orchestra came to life. After that,I had to adjust the position and size of the video windows — which did take a while — and then the job was finished.On the night of January 30, images like the ones below were burned into my retinas all night while I finished the video .

So here is visual proof that you sent flawless performances. Look how neatly the waveforms line up like soldiers across the audio tracks! Editing them was genuinely a pleasure.

The third difference was that I reinforced the many ukulele sounds with a bass guitar — after all, it has four strings too — and I also received a surprise triangle-playing video. I edited its sound into the middle section. The colleague who sent it did not know what song we were playing, but apparently she sensed exactly what was needed .

One final thing: for World Ukulele Day I had the honor of being invited to an interview by fellow ukulele player Eszter, and I was happy to answer all her questions. The interview was published on the Vaskarika website on February 1, 2021, and you canread it by clicking here.

So, with a great deal of love, here is our World Ukulele Day video in which we play Brahms's Lullaby on ten ukuleles, triangle and bass guitar. Thank you to every participant for the enthusiastic strumming !

I hope you too will pick up your ukulele and play something for World Ukulele Day!