Started with some new songs, and the beginnings of my new Hawaiian set I’m preparing. Then for some reason I got into a block of doing songs about animals, and just kept going. Like, half the show turned into a challenge to play as many songs as I could with references to different ones. The combo continued on a lot longer than I expected.
I realized I don’t have many songs about reptiles, which was curious. Eventually I remembered that Disney had a bunch of animal songs and so I dug up a few of those from the memory bank. All in all was a fun day of practice!
Started out a little low energy playing random songs, and eventually had to take a decent sized noodling break to recover the voice. I’m feeling like everything I do is just a bit sloppy, and its starting to get to me. But then, I don’t really like putting the effort I need to learn things properly on stream, so then I just play more half-finished songs and kind of get away with it. Kind of. I should have just done a learning stream today, but I was tired and lazy, so I get what I put in. Oh well. Still another day of practice.
I finished watching My Ribdiculous Reincarnation, and am positive its gonna be one of my favorite anime of the spring 2026 season. What a great show. Today’s stream went well, we had a good amount of folk in the audience, and a few new people dropping in. Today started with some ska, went into some of the newer songs, did a little island style, and ended with a bit of metalele. I was feeling kind of tired and lazy going into the day, but as I’ve learned, if I just start singing I’ll eventually get into it and have a good time.
I’m also a little stressed about my upcoming procedures, there’s a bunch of stuff going on with that, but we’ll see how that shakes out. Taking care of my health is my “real job” after all, so I have to do what I can to make that work out.
Over the weekend I started watching My Ribdiculous Reincarnation, and man, what a fun show. Turning all the tropes on its head, playing with all sorts of art styles and visual productions, and telling a pretty cool story to boot. I’ve only watched a few of spring 2026 shows so far, but I can tell this is gonna be one of the top ones. So much fun.
Today on stream it was the Sparrow’s turn to shine. I like Electric Mondays because whenever I pick up the electric uke’s I have a great time… even if its a Monday and I’m dragging myself back to work.
Started with some anisong, and then got into a long period where I worked on scales. I noticed I was having trouble with a particular hand transition in the two octave scale, and so I drilled down and focused on it a bit. With a bunch of efx on. Seemed like nobody was watching anyway, so I just noodled and practiced for a while. I found an interesting solution involving shifting from my pointer to my ring finger, and now just need to drill that motion a bunch.
Started the stream with some island style, quickly went into emo, and then spent some time chatting about old cartoons that we grew up with. There was a nice chunk of noodling in the middle there, then ended on some silly songs and favorites. All in all not a bad way to cap off the week!
It’s funny how if I’m exhausted at the end of the stream I’ll completely forget what I did that day. I know I ended with a bunch of noodling, because I was already tired early and starting to feel a headache coming on.
A good portion of the stream was spent talking about BoyWithUke with a big fan of his, and that was pretty interesting. I’m only familiar with a handful of his songs, but I got to learn a bit more about his backstory and current status. Seems like he’s now a man with an electric guitar, but these things happen. If the music is good, it doesn’t matter how its made, right?
Well, I’m still musing over the latest book I read on the Political Economy of Music and chewing over the idea that most “successful” musicians are pawns of the powers that be. I’ve been resisting that – I don’t want to be an Amazon employee. I don’t want to work for YouTube, or Meta, or Patreon. In my misfortune, I’m lucky enough to be in a spot where I can make music without my daily bread on the line, so then, what do I want to do?
We sang a lot today. Uh… well, I guess that’s every day! There were a handful of new folk who joined in the chat, which was cool. They seemed to enjoy themselves, and I hope they come back. Also got a bit of a nudge from a viewer to do more Hawaiian songs, and as I’m gearing up to try play on the beach and in public here in the islands, its probably a good idea to start expanding my repertoire in that direction.
Yesterday it seems I got a copyright restriction in certain regions for playing audio from a random Spanish song from the 70’s. Apparently, my hilariously bad attempt at singing “Informer” sounded exactly enough like a pop song that our robot overlords flagged me for a wrist slap. What a world we live in.
Today we started off with more review of memorized songs from the performance set and a few more I would like to get on the list. Then I went through a few of my favorites from this latest batch, again with the intent of memorizing them eventually. I also started spending a little more time trying to noodle over progressions, because its been really bothering me a lot lately that I can’t free play neat sounding instrumental breaks on demand. Only way to get there is practice!
Someone commented that it was odd for me to sing a Blondie song, which I’m still not sure is actually weird or not. I dunno, I like the song so I’m gonna sing it. Toward the end of the day, I had a viewer with requests for songs I hadn’t heard before, and did the “interpret off the chart to make a version” thing. It was actually pretty fun, and they seemed to like it. Plus they led me to a bunch of new songs that either got added or will probably get added in the next batch!
In anime news, I finished watching “Farming Life In Another World” Season 2 this week, and it was good fun. The isekai slop I live for. What a great show.
I started with the story of how I came to own the Fanner, went into some of the songs I tripped over yesterday at the beach, wandered for a while and tried to learn some new songs, then got turned on the distortion and ended the day with some emo songs.
Every time I play the electric ukulele’s I have an absolute blast, its just that I always feel like I want to play them with a full band accompaniment, and I don’t see that happening anytime in my near future. So, for now they’re gonna stay my way to kick off the week and have fun with music. Ain’t that the point?!
I was working up to it all week: getting my hair cut, practicing on the tenor uke, going through songs I have memorized. I woke up a little later than I wanted to and almost made an excuse to not go, but I did it!
It took 12 minutes of upright time from preparing to leave to getting flat on the beach. I got really lucky with an open space under a tree very close to the beach entrance so I didn’t even have to open up the umbrella I brought. Not bad. I think next time I’ll jump into the water for a second before settling in to play.
It was really weird to play with no monitoring whatsoever, so I had no clue until afterward if the stream was working or how the sound was. It seems the data gets choppy and lags on occasion, but overall I think it sounds good. I was worried that the sound of the waves would be overwhelming, but the balance seems quite ok.
Playing from memory was mostly ok too. Good thing a lot of my memorized songs are relatively beach-friendly. It definitely feels strange to play certain songs out on the sand. Now I want to start memorizing more too though so I have more new songs to sing away from the charts.
If I place the camera in such a way that people can see me I won’t be able to monitor or respond to chat, which isn’t often a problem but I don’t know if that’s really a good plan. I can’t really think of a good way to capture me and the beach and watch chat in on a single phone. Even with ordering some of the gear I’m thinking of to support this kind of thing it might be tricky. I hope with an Ipad I’ll at least be able to check chat between songs? Maybe.
I had to cut the stream short because I forgot to bring sunscreen and I haven’t been outside in quite a long time. I was already feel the sun on my arms after an hour, and usually by the time you feel it its already too late. Luckily I don’t seemed to have gotten burned, but I definitely need to use the sunscreen. The number one rule of the beach is “Respect Nature”. The ocean is bigger than you and owes you nothing. The sun will get you, its just a matter of time.
The return trip home totaled 30 minutes of upright time. There was extra time for packing up, dusting off the sand, and showering afterwards. The additional activity and pushing my upright time to the limit did leave me on the verge of a headache for the rest of the day, so I rightfully chilled out and didn’t do much afterwards. I was glad I only spent an hour outside, though maybe the extra time between upright activity might work out a little better.
All in all I think its a good start. It might be some time before I’m able to do this without several days of recovery in between them, but I think I’ll be able to make it a habit.
