Archive for the ‘Tutorial’ Category

Spice Up Your Playing with Modes

I’m sure I’m not the only one who often feels like they’re trotting out the same licks and scales all the time. When I feel like that, I like to dig out a new move (or an old move I’ve forgotten about) and experiment with. One place to find these ideas is in modes. There’s […]

How I’m Improving My Sound

I’ve been working on slowly improving my sound the last couple of years. It’s still very much an ongoing process and I’m certainly not an expert. But a few people have asked about it on YouTube, so I thought I’d rundown the gear I use when I make videos. Ukuleles: This part has been unchanged […]

Five Tips for Playing Live Ukulele

Today’s post comes from Brazilian ukulele virtuoso João Tostes. He’s one of the top ukulele players in the world in my estimation. So it’s a huge pleasure to have him on. João has a new live album out called Live Ukulele: Here, There & Everywhere which you can find on Spotify, Apple Music and other […]

The 1234 Rule: Left Hand Technique

Today is a guest post from Brad of Live ‘Ukulele and is a modified excerpt from his new ebook, Left Hand Technique For ‘Ukulele. If you enjoy the post, I highly recommend checking it out. It’s packed with useful tips. When you’re jamming on your ‘ukulele, there are certain conventions you can follow to make […]

Playing Two Songs at Once

Warning: This post started out as a bit of fun and ended up breaking my brain. Playing a Round Alone I while back Guido Heistek posted a challenge to play a song in the round by yourself. A round is where the same melody is performed over itself with a different starting point. For example, […]

Tutorial: What’s the Deal with Augmented Chords?

Following on from the What’s the deal with sus chords? post, here’s a post demystifying another strange but highly effective chord type: augmented chords. The Basics On chord sheets you’ll usually see augmented chords represented by aug or +. So C augmented would be shortened to Caug or C+. Augmented chords are very similar to […]

Classical Music on a Ukulele

Today’s post come courtesy of Paul Mansell. Paul’s a a professional ukulele player and author who specialises in classical music. He’s just released a new book Classical Uke and was kind enough to share his thoughts on the uke being used for classical music. As we all know, the ukulele was for many years seen […]

Five Blues Licks from the Masters

Here are five licks adapted from blues gods to inspire your own solos. Play them as they are, change the rhythm, move them around, use the same shapes. There’s no end to the ways to make them your own. All the licks are in the key of C. So you can move them around to […]

Why Use a Capo? And Tools for Transposing

I’ve written a bunch of posts about capos. But AJ pointed out that I’ve never done a post explaining why you might want to use a capo. So time to rectify that. To Make a Song Easier to Play Most of the time I use a capo is to make a song more uke-friendly. When […]

Tab Reading FAQs: Xs, Brackets and Arches

I’ve written up a full guide to reading tab but there are few questions I get asked a lot. So here’s a little post clearing up any problems. What do the numbers in brackets mean? There are two ways brackets are used. The first is to indicate these are background notes that should be played […]

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