Given the recent resurgence of interest in the ukulele there are clubs popping up everywhere which are generally very beginner-friendly and supportive, if you’re interested you might see if there’s one near you - check out the turnout at the one in my city (link).
Looks like fun, and I don’t know if there’s more to it than that, but as I see in the video, it’s not really conducive to ‘help me, I know nothing’ like 1 on 1 lessons are.
In the mean time I spend about an hour split between finding songs I know with the 4 or 5 chords I know and as well as practicing different strumming techniques.
It’s clearly easier than the guitar. I know that’s partially because I’ve spent zero time learning theory, but still, I can live with that for now. I’m hoping that if I spend and hour or so 3-4 times a week, in a month or two I’ll be able to go from ‘what was that?’ to ‘hey, that was Three Little Birds/TSwift/Jason Mraz’ without someone having to think about it or guess. Every time I play I get better at switching chords without thinking about it. But that happened with guitar too, so it’s no surprise*.
The resurgence, the fact that every hipster on the internet is playing it is sort of what I’m counting on for help here. Like I said earlier, I’d rather play the bari uke, but there was, honestly, like 2 people doing (online) lessons for it and they only went a few lessons deep
I’m still in search of a good website/youtube series that is actual lessons. That is, a series of 10+ videos that takes you from nothing to being able to play. 90+% of the videos are just teaching you a song, all well and good, but it’s no different than just grabbing the tabs for guitar and playing a song and saying you can play the guitar.
It reminds me of someone I knew in college. He was at my dorm/apartment with a bunch of other people, saw a guitar and asked if he could play it. My struggling friend and I, of course, said ‘go ahead’ and he busted out some Dave Matthews song. It was pretty impressive. When he asked what he should play next, we gave him some suggestions. Zeppelin? Floyd? (C’mon, Money?) CCR? Any blues song? (since that’s what we were teaching ourselves). Nope, none of them, all he could play was a handful of DMB songs. I realized later he didn’t know how to play the guitar, he just memorized 3 or 4 DMB songs. Don’t get me wrong, it was impressive, but give me some sheet music and and a few months and I can memorize a song on the piano, it doesn’t mean I know how to play the piano, it just means I can smash a few hundred keys in the right order. I’ll bet 20 dollars he couldn’t tell you the name of a single chord, chord progression or probably even start in the middle of the song if he had to. It’s like learning not a foreign language but just a few phrases that you can spill out of your mouth. “Where’s the bathroom?”, “I’d like a burger”, “Thank you” and not even knowing them well enough to not mix them up once in a while.
Anyways, I’m going to keep noodling along, but I’m always open to suggestions.
*I’ve kinda thought about giving Justin Guitar a crack at teaching me guitar again, but one thing at a time.