Live ‘Ukulele: The Blog

I got a package of Tiki Taboo 6mm Guitar picks a couple of days back. They are fun to play with. The picks make a more clacky/muffled sound and make some of the guitar songs I know sound better.

Tips for reading and playing guitar music on ‘ukulele:

• All chords shown for guitar are played the same on ‘ukulele. Say the music says to play an E6  chord on guitar; play an E6 chord on ‘ukulele (unless you are playing in a different key)
• 5th chords can be played as the major shown. D5 = D. Or you can make a 5th by taking the 1st note of a scale and the 5th note of the scale and applying them to the fretboard (D5 would be: 2250).

I got a record of The Doobie Brothers Minute by Muinte for $1.00 at the Salvation Army . I am going to try to find all of the Doobie Brothers records.

I had a very busy weekend – now I am kind of tired.

On friday, I went with my dad to the Doobie Brothers concert. It. Was. Awesome! They had a local rock/blues/country band open up for them who were pretty good. Then we had to wait for some 30 minutes before the Doobie Bros – all 8 of them (I think) – came out. They opened with “Dangerous” – by the way the music is really loud at this point – and then played four or five more songs before even talking to us. After another 10 or 11 songs they went offstage to leave us hanging. Then they came back out to play “China Grove”, “This Train I’m On” plus a couple more, and then they finished up with “Listen to the Music”. “Listen to the Music” was cool because all of the band members’ kids came out to play and sing; the one that stood out most to me was Pat Simmons’s son who played lead guitar.

On Saturday I went to Waimea for Kahilu Theater’s Ukulele and Slack key Institute. There I took two classes: Ukulele II and Strum like the Wind II. Ukulele II was just learning some hand-out songs taught by Gordon Mark. Strum like the Wind II was a tecnique thing about the triple strum tought by James Hill.

After the ukulele classes we went to the Music Exchange in Waimea. They had some nice stuff, naturally the ukuleles stuck out to me the most. I took a $1200 (don’t drop it) one for a test drive – incredible.  I walked out of the shop with some knowledge and a low G string. My uke has lousy projection so the wound string helps with that. It also lets me play riffs that were too low to play before.