Uke Monthly Progress - January 2024
Posted on January 30, 2024 by Aywren
While I didn’t announce the fact that I was back to practicing my uke again, I did start back up at the beginning of the new year. I’d be practicing fairly often through the summer months (which I didn’t keep up with in this blog), but fell off the practice wagon back in September.
Thankfully, uke is a pretty fast instrument for me to bounce back to practicing. I just have to take care that I don’t mess up my strumming finger as I’m prone to blisters if I’m too eager to play after having taken a break.
My consistency was good this month – I’ve played every day (except for today as I’m writing this before my practice session – but I will)!
I continue to focus on the EEI method book, which I’m now quite familiar with in terms of the tunes and chords up to a certain point. Once again, I worked my way up through the easier tunes to the one song I always seem to fall off at – Hound Dog (yes, the Elvis song).
Hound Dog itself is not a hard tune to play for me. I don’t fall off here because of this song being too difficult to move past. I usually fall off here because the next step is more notation learning and fingerstyle songs.
While I don’t mind fingerstyle, I do enjoy chord strumming more in general – simply because I’m still learning how to read uke notation. This time around, I didn’t let that hold me back.
I’m pleased to note that my practice has finally pushed past Hound Dog this past month, on to When the Saints Go Marching In. In fact, I’m at the place where I feel like I should be moving to the next song in the book – Amazing Grace – I just haven’t cut out enough time for a good solid practice session to work on learning something new.
EEI does a good job of weaving in old traditional songs with a few more contemporary in practice, which is something I like about it. Sadly, the only way to get backing tracks is to have the Kindle version on a Fire Tablet – but I do swing that.
Hopefully in another month, I’ll be updating with good news that I’ve gotten even further in the method book this time around.