Ukulele For Dummies by Alistair Wood Read Free Book Online

the right way
    The best advice for strumming – and life in general – is to stay loose. Tightening up is a surefire way to sound robotic and tire yourself out quickly.
    The second-best piece of advice is to strum with your wrist rather than with your arm. If years of playing Whack-a-Rat at the fairground have taught me anything, it’s that moving your arm up and down gets tiring very quickly. So you want to be moving your wrist and doing no more than rotating your forearm.
    You don’t need to strum much more widely than the strings. Try not to make your strums too wide because maintaining a steady rhythm then becomes harder and you tire more quickly.
    When you strum down, your nail hits the string first. When you strum up, the pad of your finger hits the string first. This pattern creates a nice balance between a more forceful down-strum and a softer up-strum.
    Stay relaxed, not only in your hands and arms but also in your whole body. When you concentrate too hard on your playing, you can easily tense up without noticing, which can lead to getting tired and achy. So every so often consciously relax your arms and shoulders before you get back to playing.
    Refusing to use a pick!
    At this point, I wish I had the technology to reach out of the book and strangle you until you promise not ever to use a pick on your ukulele. But until those far-off future days of hover-boards, moon-juice and literature violence, I have to resort to pleading. Please don’t use a guitar pick to strum your ukulele! (This point is the only thing about playing the ukulele that I’m going to be an ogre about, I promise.)
    Picks are designed to be used on tough steel strings, not delicate ukulele strings. Using one of those thick rhino-toenails on a ukulele creates a nasty clicking sound that spoils your ukulele strum.
    Playing with a pick also restricts you when you want to move on to more complex strums that involve using your thumb and other fingers.
    If you absolutely must use a pick – and I’m not accepting any excuse less than having had your hand eaten by bears – get a felt one. They’re more delicate and suit the ukulele much more.
    Pressing On to Fretting
    When you’re holding your ukulele correctly and comfortably as I describe in the preceding sections, you need to start pressing down on the strings with your fretting hand to produce different notes.
    The pitch of a string changes depending on its length: the shorter the string, the higher its pitch. Flip to Chapter 2 for more info on pitch.
    When you hold down a string (called fretting it) you make it shorter. The fret wire (the metal strip that runs vertically across the neck) is there to make sure that the string is exactly the length it needs to be to make the correct note.
    You hold the string down, it gets stopped by the fret wire and it can vibrate only in front of that.
    Positioning your fretting hand
    Start by putting out your fretting hand (your left hand if you’re right-handed) flat in front of you (palm up). Then put the ukulele in your hand so that the nut is pointing right at the bottom of your index finger, as shown in Figure 3-5. (Turn to Chapter 1 to discover the names of your ukulele’s various parts.)
    Now bring your thumb around the neck so that it sticks out above the top of the nut. The neck of the uke is now cradled between your index finger and thumb. This position provides good support for the uke and leaves your hand in the perfect position for fretting.
    Figure 3-5: Fretting hand, initial position.

    Curl your fingers around so that they arc high over the strings, just like in Figure 3-6. You need to make sure that your finger doesn’t touch any string other than the one you want to fret.
    Figure 3-6: Fretting hand, final position.

    When you’re playing a particularly tricky passage, you can move your thumb to the back of the neck, which frees up your fingers and lets you apply more pressure.
    The frets