Skip to main content

Day Ninety Nine (Year Four)

Most of my musical activity tonight was ukulele related.  I hadn't picked it up in about a week, and on a whim, after running through my lick for Guitar Aerobics, I took it out of the case, and tuned it up.  I was a little bit rusty, but went back through a few basic chords, and found that it came back pretty quickly.

Also, I finally found the "Learn Ukulele" book that I had snagged at Half Price Books over the summer.  It's got good lessons in it that advance at a good rate for someone just starting out.  There's also a huge chord and scale dictionary in the back part of the book, which is awesome.

After playing for about half an hour, I ventured out to the computer, and tried to find a tabbed out version of Jake Shimabukuro's take on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps."  I found something that at least comes close, from the sound of the description, and that will be a good enough place for me to start.  His version of that song is my holy grail on ukulele.

And then, of course, after that I found a YouTube video of him performing Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," so yeah, maybe there are two ukulele holy grails in my world.

All told, the music tonight was relaxing and productive, even though there wasn't much guitar involved.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

DayOne Hundred Sixty Nine (Year Eight)

Today was another good day.  I spent all of it with my brother, which I needed a lot, even though I just saw him over Christmas. Tonight we finally got around to some music discussion.  He took a look at my list of goals for the year, and sees it as a really good set of steps to get me where I'd like to be from where I am.  I picked his brain about a few of the nagging questions I still had as I get started, and he was able to put my mind at ease. Having a chance to sit and chat with him is always good for my musical soul, because he constantly drives me to be a better, more well rounded player, and I'm pretty sure that I can never thank him enough for all of the advice, support, and encouragement he offers every time we chat.

Day Two Hundred Six (Year Four)

Today was the first official day of the second half of my "album-in-a-month" challenge. As for today's goals, I wanted to see what I could get done in regards to track order, and get at least a little bit of a start on the lyric writing process. I spent more time working on the track order question than I did on the lyrics today, but as a result of that, I ended up with something that I think will work in terms of order. I did sit with the notebook for a few minutes at the very end of the day, and got a solid starting line of lyric and some other ideas that I hope will be jumping off points for lyrics. What I'm thinking I might do, however, is switch my focus from the lyric writing part of the process directly to the recording part of the process.  That way, if I can get the music recorded and burned onto a CD, I can take the music with me in the car, and listen and try to see what images and thoughts the music brings up.  It's a tactic that has worked for...

Day Three Hundred Fifty Six (Year Two)

Well, on first listen I was underwhelmed by Motion City Soundtrack's My Dinosaur Life .  And yet, while it wasn't the giant explosion of musical awesomeness that it had been billed as, I did find one diamond in and amongst all of the other rough.  It came in the form of "Stand Too Close," the seventh track on the album.  That , my friends, is a song that I can see generating a lot of plays in my itunes.  Another thing that dawned on me today.  At some point, I'd really like to own a ukelele.  They've had these unbelievably cheap uke packs at work for the last couple of Christmases or so, but the instruments appear to be so poorly made that it wouldn't even be worth it.  That said, I found a cool website online today that gave a few hints on how to simulate a uke on an acoustic guitar.  Apparently, if you put a capo at the 5th fret, and then play ukelele chord shapes on the 4 highest strings, you can get close.  Especially if you've got a ny...