What I am doing

What I am going to be blogging here is my efforts to go back and—as my coaches used to say in high school—work on the basics.

Like a lot of people who take up the ukulele, I have purchased some books and DVDs and learned a certain amount. And now I've realized that isn't good enough. Mostly because, despite a lot of learning, I'm not very good. I'm better than I used to be. I can now sing a song more or less on key and strum along as I do so. I can also pick out a melody so long as it isn't too complex. And that impresses me subjectively. I am amazed that I can do this. But I don't impress anyone, including myself, objectively.

As often happens, I didn't figure out what I was doing wrong until I saw it in someone else. I have a friend who has been wanting to learn guitar for years now. But he always goes straight for the end result. He wants to be able to pick up a guitar and play and sing. What he doesn't want to do is break that act up into a series of separate tasks and practice them in a disciplined way. He doesn't want to work on the basics.

This really shows up with singing. There is a massive amount of art ranging from literature to movies dedicated to reinforcing the fantasy that singing is just a matter of letting what is inside us come out. A big part of the problem is that we can't see our vocal cords. With the ukulele we can see that we have trouble holding a particular chord down or keeping a particular strumming pattern. Singing feels like it just happens magically so it feels like it should just happen if we want it badly enough. It won't.

The problem is not desire. If losing weight was about really wanting to, everyone would be thin. And if playing and singing were just a matter of really wanting to, a lot more people would be able to do it.


And that does carry over in a  sense with playing too. We imagine that we have the music inside us and all we need to do is learn the techniques to get it out. But learning music is actually about getting the music inside us. The technique is what puts music into us and not what lets it out.