I wasn’t really ready to start this project, so a lot of it will be slowly built out live. But now that the ball is rolling, nothing to do but chase after it. It all started when I randomly clicked on a Reddit post promoting the Ukulele Tribe Discord. That was apparently formed after some drama on the Ukulele Underground forums, but I haven’t dug too far into that and frankly don’t care much for drama. Anyway, I joined both groups, and wanted to share my electric uke journey with them, and so pulled the trigger on making my own little corner of the internet.
As it happens, a new friend from the discord who is an actual professional musician has been giving me some great advice on different ways to improve, so that’s been taking up an unexpected amount of time. But I’m spending the time to act on the advice because it will be so clearly useful to me. It’s really not anything super unheard of before – focus when you practice, learn the notes on your fretboard, listen to music that defines the style you want to play.
When I mentioned I wanted to play jazz, he suggested that I start by getting really familiar with blues. Well, to tell the truth, I’ve never been super interested in blues music. I love all the complexity inherent in jazz and have listened to quite a lot of that, but my musical tastes have always been a bit eclectic. My favorite genres are shoegaze, goth rock, punk, emo, hardcore, ska, industrial, idm, some edm, a range of jazz styles (bebop, big band, neo and electro-swing, gypsy, modal, smooth, swing), ambient and experimental, classical, and of course, anime songs.
Notably missing from this list are blues and pop. Actually I have a fondness for 80’s, 90’s and early 00’s music, but a lot of early rock and classic pop eludes me. I don’t mind most of it, but I don’t usually choose to listen to a lot of the more well known artists of the past half century. When I want to perform, I usually feel a need to go out of my way to find songs that I hope other people have heard. And since I’m starting this project to put myself and my music in front of people,
So I put together a playlist of songs I think that I would like to perform, and I think that people would like to hear. The advice was to work on 3 songs at a time and polish them up to become performance ready, so that will be the project for the tenor and singing for the foreseeable future. These aren’t really songs that I would choose to polish for the sake of singing to myself, but I like them enough to put the work in to present it to the world. I would really like to do more of my eclectic favorites, but maybe that can wait until I have more of an audience.
The next piece of advice was that if I want to play jazz, I should listen to more blues and learn to play it. Makes sense, if I want to play a certain genre, I should learn about its roots and develop a sense of how it got to be what it is. And so begins a journey to learn the blues. I was actually surprised, the original blues are a lot more raw and soulful than I had expected. I am quite liking it too actually.
And learning to love the 12-bar blues is looking to be more exciting than I had expected too. Tonight I spent a couple hours just noodling a scale over the progression while learning where the notes on my fretboard are. Imagine that, nearly 10 years in and I never took the time to properly learn my fretboard notes before. I mean, for the majority of what I play, I only needed to know my chords and to be able to sing in tune. That was until I got bit by the baritone bug earlier this year and developed a taste for fingerstyle. And developed aspirations to actually be able to solo during the instrumental breaks, and maybe one day play solo jazz ukulele.
Here’s a little taste of my 12-bar blues noodling:
Apparently a generic 12-bar blues progression in F is copyrighted, but for now they seem to be allowing me to post the backing track, just in case anyone feels like some noodly practice of their own:
Well, it’s up for now. And yes, that’s a Digitone 2. I need to do a whole rundown my setup now that this channel is live, so stay tuned. I still think some better should music come first though.