First Lesson
I am so glad I decided to get lessons for my ukulele progress. As midterm approaches, I was feeling really unmotivated and frustrated with my progress. There are so many different aspects of the ukulele you need to work on to be able to play the songs I have chosen; strumming patterns, chord changing, pace to strum, etc. To mention as well, I do not understand how to read music. This makes learning an instrument and a song really difficult. Luckily, my music teacher wrote a way for me to learn Riptide without knowing how to read music.
I am not going to share this on here due to it being his writing and I do not have his consent, but I will explain how this is done for my future teaching.
Because this is a three-chord song, he wrote down each chord, and wrote the strumming patterns in ” U, D, U, D”, meaning up or down for strumming on each note. He also put a line for me to know there is a break. He also put the notes underneath with a picture of where they are on the ukulele, where which finger should go using numbers, and it has helped tremendously. I am thankful for this as I can use this in my future teaching if a student is having difficulty with reading music as well to start out. This is going to take some practice, but I believe I will be pretty close to being able to finish this song. The difficult part is the strumming pattern and pace changes, and going from A to G is difficult. Practice will help every day!
I now know what chords are, where my fingers should be, and how to strum along with this song. I just need to get up to the pace and work on changing the chords quicker with my fingers as this is really difficult for me at this time.
Photo by Zack Smith on Unsplash