Mastering the beginning stages of the Ukulele (Final update on the Radical Learner Project)

Mastering is a strong word for where I feel I'm at now, but there is definite progress. I can play several chords and parts of songs, as well as strum a few tunes that just sound pretty good. I really feel like I've conquered the feel of the Ukulele, and it took mostly a lot of dedication and focus.

One of the hardest parts was using online resources to gather my information. Parts of it were great, such as being able to reference videos of people performing the task and searching for different instruction sets that gave me different techniques to try. One of the techniques that was the most difficult for me to learn was 'chucking' or 'muted strumming'. This is when you get a sort of harder scraping of the chords, and it acts as more of an accent than a specific note. There are a couple ways to do it including hitting the strings with your palm as you strum and lightening your grip on the strings with the other hand.

This technique was difficult because it dealt specifically with the physics of the ukulele and how the sound travels. It was one of the moments where I really could have used an instructor to explain it to me because it was simply baffling at first. I could hear it, and I could see it, but it was so hard to understand exactly what was happening. Eventually it just clicked.

One thing that this highlighted for me in particular was the relationship between practice (homework) and learning (class time). When I would practice without any resources it would have to be things that I understood fully how to do and were fairly easy. I might not have been great at it, but I fully understood what it was I was trying to do.

I've uploaded an audio file of me playing, and it's still not perfect but you can at least get a feel for the progress. From here the next thing to do would be to continue learning chords and to start putting them together to learn to play full songs. There are a couple of these that came from pieces of song tutorials, but I haven't fully been able to put the chords into practice because learning chords and learning a song are two very very different things.