Another interval

A while ago I did a post on intervals and talked about two intervals: major seconds and major thirds.

Today, another interval, the minor second.

On the ukulele a minor second is the space between any two frets. Finger a note on any fret somewhere on the middle of the neck (meaning about halfway between the top of the neck and the body). Play it and now slip up a fret and play that. That is a minor second.

We already know minor seconds because there are two of them in the scale:

Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do

The interval from Mi to Fa is a minor second and so is the interval from Ti to Do. So, we already know it; meaning we have been singing minor seconds since grade school without knowing it.

And now we want to wrap our minds around it. We want to play and sing them until next Thursday getting a solid feel for this interval. In the G scale the two minor seconds are from B (Mi) to C (Fa) and from F# (Ti) to G (Do). We can also figure out where they are in the F scale, the A scale, and C scale.

There is more on minor seconds from a great teacher named Jim D'Ville here (including that a minor second can apparently also be called an augmented unison). I'm cribbing the idea of a weekly interval from Jim D'Ville only I'm not going in order from smallest to largest as he does and I'm going to pick all my intervals from the G diatonic scale and he uses the C chromatic.

Resources

Buying an ukulele

If you have the money to buy a really good ukulele right off the bat, your task is easy. But if, like most of us, you want to start with something a little cheaper, you have challenges.

My experience is that you can get a good learner ukulele for relatively little money ($60). However, you can also get a real piece of crap and I have one of those in the basement. I think there are two things to look for in a beginner ukulele.

Intonation

The whole process of learning is connecting your ear/brain to your fingers. In order for that to work the instrument has to be capable of actually producing the desired notes. If you get a note that is a little higher or lower than what you are supposed to get on certain frets then the connection never gets made.

So here is the thing: buy a chromatic tuner before you buy your ukulele! And then test every ukulele you look at. You want a chromatic tuner with numbers on the scale. It should have a mark in the middle to indicate when the note is right on and then plus and minus numbers on a scale on either side. Go to the store and go up the fret board playing each note.

Any ukulele worth buying should get the vast majority of notes right on the centre. Of the few that are off it should not miss notes by more than "ten cents". Ten cents is an expression meaning more than plus or minus 10 one hundredths off the note. When you buy your chromatic tuner, get the salesperson to show you where that is on your tuner. (A good store, by the way, should have tuners ready to lend you so you can do this test.)

If there are no stores in your area and you have to buy mail order, make sure you can return the instrument if the intonation is bad. (By the way, pay attention to how the tone is affected by how hard you push down. Some "intonation problems" vanish when you learn how to apply the right amount of pressure.

By the way, I strongly suggest that your first uke should be a concert-size. These are the second smallest of the common ukulele sizes. Purists will push for the soprano or standard size but the truth is that it is much, much harder to build a good soprano and you are much more likely to find a concert size with good intonation. And good intonation is absolutely essential. A boomerang that doesn't come back is just a stick and an ukulele with bad intonation is just a decoration for your wall.

Playability and my recommendation

This refers to how hard it is to press the strings down, how wide the neck is and other elements. The bad news here is that there are limits to how much of this you can figure out ahead of time. Worse, it will hurt at first. Pushing the strings down is hard until you build up muscles and skin thickness on your fingers.

If you have a friend who plays they can give you some guidance. There are some brands that are more reliable than others. I started with an Oscar Schmidt and I recommend it. It has an obvious downside in that the sound is a little dull largely because these ukuleles are built a little too solidly. On the other hand, that is a good thing for a beginner. But the intonation was good, better than anything else in the price range (you'll want to test anyway because even a good manufacturer will mess one up now and then).

Best of all, they are widely available so the odds are pretty good that the guitar shop in your town will have one.

If you Google around and visit message boads, you will notice some really savage reviews of Oscar Schmidt ukuleles. There is a simple reason for this: Oscar Schmidt are readily available and are a threat to a lot of people.

You'll find a concurring opinion here. And you'll find another here.

What I am doing an ongoing series

Besides renovating the house that is.

Well, I'm discovering some of the virtues of using recorder books instead of ukulele books to learn with. Most ukulele books, as I have said before, are highly compressed. They aren't really learning books so much as starter books. They get you started on a few things but then leave you no where to go. Recorder books give you exercise after exercise to work through.

Of course, that is the reason most ukulele books don't give you much more than a start. All that drilling scares people off. Why, the next thing you know we'll be talking about scales.

But drilling makes sense. Here is an example of why. Any time I try to master singing a series of notes there are two separate problems. One is to get the jumps up and down the intervals just right so that I hit the right tones. But, at the same time, I have to sing each note for the right duration so it sounds like the melody it is supposed to sound like. And I never get both right the first time.

So what did I do? Instinctively, I split the job into two tasks. I mastered the up and down first and then went back to figure out the horizontal. And that is all the learning books do. They just do it in a more systematic and thorough-going manner. And so I keep plugging. I'm up to exercise 27 and 28 in the Mario Deschenes book.

At the same time I keep playing for fun and have been playing around with By the Light of the Silvery Moon this week. And that gave me an idea for next week.

Monday Tune

Cowgirl tuning

Speaking of inauthentic tunings, I've been playing around with A tuning. I've read that Cliff Edwards used this one but I've never seen evidence of it. However, Joel Eckhaus definitely uses it on his tenor and so does a guy named RJ Culp. That's his video below (recorded in the bathroom, the poor man's echo chamber).

Why do I call it Cowgirl tuning? Because it gives the tenor a nice throaty sound without becoming so guitar like it stops sounding like a uke. It's almost a cowboy sound with a certain ukey sexiness. It doesn't boom the way putting low-G on a tenor does and it has easier reaches than the baritone. (Plus, if you used the same tuning but with a low fourth string on your baritone it will be reverse cowgirl tuning!* I ought to be ashamed of that ...  and yet I'm not.






*That ought to bring some disappointed searchers. Bah ha ha .....

I'm back, sort of

I'm back, sort of. Here's what we've been up to in the land of inauthentic ukulele tunings. You've heard the expression, "we decided to rip out the bathroom and rebuild"? Well, here is what rip out the bathroom means:

Anyway, I was cleaning things out of the fridge and found just a little bit of left-over Pina Colada mix. And I decided to make something of it. Here is:

The Inauthentic
1.5 ounces Pina Colada mix (it probably doesn't matter what kind but I used Mr. and Mrs. T's)
1.5 ounces cream
1.5 ounces vodka (picked because Vodka is the blandest tasting hard liquor money can buy.)
A dollop of Maraschino cherry liquid (mostly to turn it pink)
a good handful or so of ice.

Pour it all in the blender and whizz it on the frozen drink setting. Pour into a high ball or Collins glass and alternate sips with strumming your ukulele (or even strumming someone else's). It tastes sort of like a milk shake and not at all like a cocktail. It is guaranteed to cause disdainful looks to cloud the faces of purists everywhere.

Too busy

No post today as I have too much paying work to do.

I like to think the guy in the picture to the left is playing ukulele.

Recalibrating yourself

An odd thing I notice is that the first note I try to get in any day I often get wrong. I mean, I get up, pull the ukulele out of its case, play a note and try and sing it back and I miss. So I have to turn on the chromatic tuner and play it over and over again while pushing my voice up or down (always down in practice) until I get it. Once I've done that I can get any other note. It's as if I have to recalibrate my ear and mouth.

Something similar happens when I change key. Because I've been singing a while I can hit the note I want but I have to reset my brain as how the notes in my mouth correspond to what is on the scale and on the fretboard.

At this point I don't know if I'll have to do this recalibration exercise every day of my life or if I'll start getting it right away.

I suspect that part of it is the distance between the notes I am playing and the notes I am singing. I am singing two whole octaves below what I am playing and it is hard to hear the relationship between notes so far apart at first. We'll see.

Monday Tune

Herbert "Happy" Lawson wrote this song and, as near as I can tell, that is his sole mark on history. But it's enough. Here it is by someone whose You Tube moniker is L. Strachey and does it up very nicely indeed. This is in D tuning and you can hear everything that I like about D tuning in it: bright sound, lovely projection.

100 years ago today ...

... the sheet music for Alexander's Ragtime Band was first published. And nothing was ever the same again. I'll deal with the arguments against this song some other time. Suffice to say for now, this is real roots music. You want to understand American music? Forget all that nonsense about Appalachian folk songs and men selling their souls at the Crossroads so they could play the blues. The real story begins with people like Stephen Foster and makes it's transition into the modern world through this song. And it's one of the songs I mean to learn to play and sing well. (I already can pay and sing it not well.)

This version was one of several done the first year the song was published. It's by Arthur Collins and Byron Harlan.

Resources

Books for learning

One of the bigger challenges for learning to play in D tuning is that practically all the learning resources available are for C tuning. For a long time Alfred was a hold out in that their Ukulele book was for D tuning but I see that they are revising it for C tuning.

So what is available? Well, I'll get to that below, but first it is important to understand the philosophy behind these things. An awful lot of books start off by assuming you already know how to sing!

Consider Jim Beloff (a great guy who has done a huge amount to support people learning to play the Uke). He likes to start off teaching people a song and the song he likes is "He's Got the Whole World in his Hands". That's a great little tune that is fun to sing, especially for Christians like me. It also makes a nice statement about the power of the musical instrument in your hands. And it only takes two chords. Why it ought to be as easy as Mary Had a Little Lamb.

But let's have a look at the melody. Click on the image to see it larger and don't worry this will make sense even if you can't read music.

Look at all those rests, dots and ties! Of course, you already know the melody, or think you do, so it ought to be easy anyway. But it isn't. There are some quite skilled musicians who can't do dotted eight-sixteenth rythmns very well and this song is full of them.

And even if you can sing a passable version all by yourself, it's something else to sing the song so it conforms to a steady beat as provided by the ukulele chords.

The point I want to make is this: no matter what book or books we do or don't use, we want to start playing melody and chords. And we want to sing.

The singing is crucial because we need to be able to hear all the music! All the music is the way the melody and chords and how the rhythms of the two work together.

So what books are available?
If you are starting from scratch, the place you want to go to is Play Ukulele Today: the Quickstart Guide for Everyone. For D tuning, you want to make sure you get one that says D6 tuning on the cover. It's a great book and it's cheap.

By the way, I'll quote one thing from it before moving on:

Where to begin? Picking melody or strumming chords? In this book you’ll do both, but where to begin is your choice. For what it’s worth, we believe that learning to play melody first gives you the best musical foundation.

That has been my experience and I'd recommend following that strategy. Everything else I do here is based on that assumption. (By the way, I wrote above "you already know the melody, or think you do". Well, I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings but the odds are that we don't really know it when we start out.

Okay, where do we go from there? Well, we could just keep going with the Ukulele in the Classroom series. I'd certainly go to the next level or so with them. Again, make sure you get the D6 edition.

Sturm und Drang

Every book ever written about music tells us that music creates stress and then returns to comfort.

We can see this in Mary above. Think of the staff as a ladder and and Do as the ground. Any time we get back to Do we can relax. When we're part way up the ladder, it gets tense.

We can see that even this painfully simple song starts off by throwing us a curve. We're already up in the air at the start and we're going down. How far down? We don't know until we get to Do. But then it starts climbing again and it goes up and up until it hits So at the end of the third bar. Then it climbs back down to safety.

And we can see that that splits into two phrases of three bars each. One takes us somewhere strange and high and the other brings us back to safety.

It's worth remembering that pattern, by the way. As we go along we might want to ask ourselves what is so special about Do and So. Music theory gives these two notes names: the Tonic and the Dominant. That's probably not an accident that they have such significant sounding names.

Anyway, the other thing is that it isn't just the music it self that tenses and relaxes. So does the person playing it and that is a bad thing. Playing music isn't like method acting.  We don't express stress better musically when we are heavily stressed. And being to relaxed just means we are more likely to make mistakes.

I read a piece by a classical guitarist once about this that is interesting. He (I can't remember his name) noted that people flub the easy bit that comes right after a difficult bit just as often as they flub the difficult bit. It's easy to see why this happens. We're floating along through an easy bit but we know that a difficult bit is coming. So we concentrate and we make it thorough, heave a sigh of relief and them miss an easy note we ought to be able to play easily.

The trick, and I haven't got it yet, is to play with the same level of controlled tension throughout.


PS: The title means storm and stress. Classical music eggheads talk about it a lot. Part of the reason for using it is that some day someone is going to Google "sturm and drang" and "ukulele" and they'll get this post. That sort of thing amuses me.

Frustration (and some music)

I've been practicing with a metronome. Why? To deal with two bad habits I have.

The first is speeding up during a song.

The metronome makes this even more frustrating because it never lies. I knew I was speeding up but the truth is that I generally sped up long before I noticed I was speeding up.

The second is related to the first. It is that I concentrate on the hard thing and forget about the basic thing. As long as I am playing only 1-2-3-4 I'm okay. But the minute it becomes 1-2-and-3-4, I get so focused on getting that "and" right that I miss the 4 afterward. And then I speed up because I lose track of where the basic beat is.

Oh, well. Keep plugging.

And now Mary and her little lamb. I know, I know but bear with me, these simple songs have a point.

Click on the image to see it large enough to play.

The thing about these basic songs is that they have nice basic intervals in them that we need to master. Don't take just my word for it*

Every interval in that song is either a second or a third. And there is a new note So, which is D in the key of G. It's played by fretting the first string at the third fret. Oh yeah, where is it on the staff? Here's some help:

One cool thing about this song is that we can add the chords to it. By ear. Start strumming in G and sing the Do-Re-Mi notes along until it sounds wrong. Then stop and make a note of that bar. Then go back and sing along again but this time change chords to D when you reach the bar where G sounded wrong. Then keep playing until your singing sounds wrong against the D chord. Then make a note of where that is and stop again. Go back to the beginning and sing and play again only change back to G when you hit the bar of music where it began to start wrong last time. Keep doing that until you reach the end.

And once we have that, we can use the song to learn how to sing and strum at the same time. I stole this idea from Ukulele Underground. When you go to their site you'll notice they do it with the words and in a  different key. Try it there way. Maybe C is a better key for you. If you're a baritone or bass, however, come back here and try it in G. Here is the link to Ukulele Underground. Note this takes you to a video.



* These songs are also in the public domain so they can be used as teaching tools without paying anyone for the privilege. As Captain Renaud would say, 'That is another reason.'

Monday Tune

Tunes actually.

The human voice is an instrument. Getting the sound out and making it sound good is a learned skill. There was probably nobody better at it than this guy:




Here's the thing. That voice is as close to natural as it can be. Meaning that it is recorded electronically but what we are hearing is the sound Mel Torme could make by placing the sound up in the front of his skull where it could reverberate naturally and beautifully. If you'd been a baby unable to sleep and Mel had come over to your crib with his ukulele and sung you this song as a lullaby, the sound his voice would have made to you would have been exactly what we hear in the video above.

Now here is another video with a lovely version of "Some Guys Have All the Luck". Listen to it once just for the joy of listening to it, especially for the lovely Glaswegian accent the singer has which is pure beauty. But then go back and listen to it again, especially the bit at the start, and you can hear the electronic treatment that has been put on her voice to give it depth. If you listen you can actually hear when the reverb or whatever it is gets turned on. She sings the first phrase naked but it gets turned on for the second. The old school singers like Torme used their instruments, which is to say their bodies, to get that depth and colour.




One more video, this time with no ukulele. This is the great Johnny Hartman. Listen for the incredible warmth he puts into his voice. (Sorry about the fashion show visuals, when we're getting the music for free, we have to take what is offered). Warmth is the quality what I want to get in my voice:

On not speeding up

Speeding up is one of my worst habits. Other people's too.

I don't mean speeding up as the song goes along, although I have to watch that too. I mean speeding up too soon as I'm learning. Eighth notes for example. If you are playing fast as you can, just gunning out two blasts every time you see a couple of eighth notes seems to work. But play more slowly and you really have to get those "ands"—as in one, two-and, thee, four-and—right on or else it sounds foolish.

The same is true for hitting the right notes. Move long fast enough and I'm off the note I missed is gone before it sinks in. Play it slowly and really matters whether you hit a note or not.

Tone matters when we go slowly too. A slightly muffled note because it wasn't fretted properly or a note that is sung on the right pitch but sounds thin won't be as noticeable.

When we're learning, it feels like we're always playing too slowly and we can convince ourselves that getting faster means getting better. But it's actually really hard to play slow and make it musical. There is a reason why punk and metal bands play fast—it's because they aren't good enough to play more slowly.

Lots of slow this week. Lots of shifting from quarter notes to eighth notes and I'm going to begin working on strumming and singing at the same time.

Making it sing

Not an ukulele player but definitely a man who knows what he is talking about





And here is some Ben Webster so we can hear what Mr. Heath means:



Somewhere Tony Bennett says his father advised him to base his singing style on a horn player instead of another singer. Imitate a singer and you'll just sound like everyone else, he said.

More music

As promised, here is some more practice stuff. If you click on the image you'll get a larger, easier-to-read picture.  Please feel free to print out anything you want but if you share, please give me a credit and link. Thanks.

Remember to try and make the notes flow out of the ukulele. Chopin used to tell his students to make the piano sing and it's good if we try and make the uke sing along with us. This involves a lot of back and forth getting us to hop from one note to another. It will take some real effort on our part to make it feel musical.

Half and quarter notes for counting practice.

Here is something in 3/4. Three=quarter time is, if you'll pardon my putting this in incorrect terms, a very male time. That one in ONE two three keeps coming back at you. I have a bad habit of playing ONE two three pause, ONE two three pause. We want that ONE coming in right on time every time. And we want it to flow.

Finally, here is one in 6/8. At this point the difference between 6/8 and 3/4 is mostly academic but six doesn't seem to get much attention in ukulele instruction books and I want to do my little bit to correct that. To carry on my incorrect metaphor, 6/8 is a womanly time; it's a lilting, swinging time with lots of potential for subtle shifts in the accents. I'm not very good at all at six and I want to fix that.

It's in 6/8 so remember quarter note gets two beats, dotted quarter gets three beats and the eighth note gets one.

Intervals

The spaces between the notes

The notes we have been singing have gaps between them. Those gaps are called intervals. Intervals are really, really familiar and really, really weird at the same time. They're familiar becasue we know them.

Try a little experiment. Find a nice comfortable low note and sing it until you've got it. Now starting from that note sing, "Somewhere, over the rainbow."

Here is the cool part, in going from "some" to "where" you jumped an octave. Check it on your chromatic tuner if you want. If you aren't exactly on the octave, you'll be close. If you missed it completely, keep plugging and you'll get it in a short while. The thing is that gap or interval is hard-wired right into your brain. And it was there right from the beginning. When your mother sang you songs in the crib, you heard those intervals. If our mothers had tried to pull a fast one on us by singing Mary Had a Little Lamb to a different melody, we would have spotted the trick right away and stomped our little feet until she did it the right way. We heard and understood that melody before we knew who Mary was or what a Lamb was.

Learning intervals really is mastering the basics. This is something we already know how to do and we are just going to learn how to do it in a more disciplined way.

2 + 2 = 3

All the gaps between the notes we have been singing and playing have names. From Do to Re is a major second. It is also exactly two frets on our ukulele. Re to Mi is also a major second although it's a little harder to see because we jump down to the first string to play it. We can play it on the second string if we want by going up two frets from Re. (In case you are wondering, the gap between notes one fret apart is a minor second but we'll save that for later.)

Okay, here is where it gets a little weird. What happens if we go all the way from Do to Mi. That is two major seconds so it should get us ... well, it gets us to a major third. Huh?

Sometimes you may hear people say that music theory is like mathematics. Well, actually it's much simpler than that: music theory is mathematics. This is easier to grasp if you done advanced math because you will already know that different kinds of mathematics have different rules. Boolean math uses different rules than the arithmetic we learned in Grade 3. The rules that apply in each kind of mathematics are a reflection of what you do with that mathematics.

In music, the theory is all about counting and measuring. We never multiply, divide, do square roots or solve problems in musical math. All we do is count and use that counting to measure so we can all do the right things at the right time. If you remember back to Grade school, you will remember that your teacher started to teach you arithmetic by saying, follow this rule. She didn't say, here is why we have the rule. We just took it for granted that she knew what she was talking about and we followed the rules. That's what we're going to do to learn music theory too. No matter how weird the rules may seem, we're going to spend the first little while just learning them.

So now we know how to count two kinds of intervals: a major second and a major third. Besides just learning to sing them, we want to learn to hear them. A fun thing to do with the ukulele is to just pick a note anywhere on the uke, play it and sing it and then play and sing the one two frets up.

And try playing one an then singing it but making the jump to the next with your voice alone. And then try playing one note and responding by singing the one two frets up. And then we can turn around and do the whole thing going down.

And we can keep doing this until that interval is ingrained in our heads so well that if someone blindfolded us and played any two notes with that interval we would be able to identify it as a major second. And if they tried to fool us by playing two other notes we would be able to say, 'No, that's not a major second.'

More music to play tomorrow.

When good enough is not good enough

My project is all about going back to master the basics. I'm still playing and singing for fun and even practicing other stuff as I do this and recommend the same for anyone else.

Of course, when I first started, exercises such as the stuff I put up yesterday were hard. I'd sit there and want to curse because I'd will my fingers to do one thing and they did either something else or nothing at all.

Now the problem is that it can sometimes feel too easy. If I just play the notes Mi-Re-Do, Mi-Re-Do over and over again, I think, 'I've got it now I'll move on.' This is, I think, good enough.

The thing I am challenging myself with is to never accept good enough as good enough. I want to do more with the simple things. I want to master the basics.

• I want to play the notes and sing them at the same time. That is I want to get those notes programmed into my brain, my ear, my mouth and my fingers so I can string them out just as easily as I do words in sentences when I speak.
• I want to make it music. Think about two notes Mi-Re. I could produce those mechanically like the way the siren on a police car does. Or I could produce like a cruel kid on a schoolyard "nyeh-nyeh, nyeh-hyeh, nyeh-nyeh". Or I could make them musical. As Eddie Condon said, it can go in like broken glass or it can go in like honey. Even with one note, we should be able to make it go in like honey.

Here is the opening phrase of a very famous song that uses only one note. (click on the image to see it larger.) Can you hear the song? Can you make others hear it with just this one note? Can you treat it with love and joy and make that one note flow like honey?

Starting the G scale

The easiest scale to play in D tuning is the D scale.

The easiest scale for a baritone like me to both play and sing in D tuning is the G scale. So I'm starting there.

The first note I'm going to play and sing is B also known as "Mi". It's dead easy as the first or bottom string is tuned to B. So we pluck the note and sing "Mi" until we have them lined up. Then we're going to start playing the notes on the staff that I wil post below.

Okay, we're also going to cut ourselves some slack. Let's not fool ourselves into thinking this will all be easy because it's just one note. It's hard to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time. Well, what we are going to do here is like patting your head, and rubbing your stomach and planning our grocery list at the same time. We'll go real slow. We'll tap our foot and count to four in our heads with each tap. As we do that we will play the notes for the required durations: quarter note gets one beat, half note gets two and whole note gets four.

Meanwhile we are quietly learning to read music—one note at a time. Here is the music:

Click on that and you will get a larger image.*

The important thing here is to take our time. We want everything right. We want to sing and play the same note at the same time, at the right time and for the right number of beats. So, as boring as this may sound, we want to keep at it until we get it right.

And then we can add a second note. This is re or A and we play it by fretting the second string (counting up from the bottom) on the third fret.

And then, when we have mastered the two, we play them together. Now, you will notice I have given this thing a name. That's not just a joke. One of the things we want to get right from the beginning is that we are always playing music. We want to play and hear these things as music. There should be no exercise so mundane that we won't treat it as music. So let's try and get music out of this:

We could stop there but it wouldn't feel like a scale if we didn't have Do yet so here is Do or G. We play it by fretting the second string on the first fret:

And then we'll play our three notes altogether remembering that we have to  play it and hear it as music. As we practice this we're going to start hearing the notes as a flow or as a series of phrases.

And that ought to be enough to keep us busy for a few days. As I said before we are not going to stop playing for fun. We're just going to take a chunk of every day to go back and master the basics. Maybe twenty minutes. And we will always sing and play the notes at the same time.


* Go ahead and print out any of the music you find here if you want. There is, obviously, nothing original in this image. It is work to do this, however, and there will be considerably more work as I go along. If you decide to share anything you find on this site with anyone else, please credit me and give a link.

What I am doing and ongoing series

Going east by traveling west: the wonders of transposing

I said I was going to mess around with scales and make mistakes and get dirty and learn things as advised by Ms. Frizzle. And I did.

So what did I learn?

Well, there is something about G. It's like a security blanket for me. When I can't find any other note with my voice, I can always get G. I fret the second string from the bottom at the first fret and play that G and I can unfailingly sing the G two octaves below in response.

And I can sing that whole scale going up from there without straining. I can go up to A and sing that scale without strain. And I can do likewise with the Bb scale, the C scale and even the D scale. I can do the Eb scale with some strain but no pain. I can go beyond that too but it gets really wobbly.

I can go lower too. I can sing an F scale, E scale and even an Eb scale and sing all, obviously, without pain. The problem, rather, is volume and projection. I can hear me at those tones but no one else could without getting pretty close.

So I'm a baritone. Which is pretty normal. Most men are baritones.

That means I can sing a lot of songs that are written on the Treble Clef. I won't be singing in the same octave but I'll be singing a melody that exactly parallels the one written (except when I make mistakes). Most of the music on the treble clef, however, tends to be between middle C and the F that is an octave and four notes above it. That is a very good range for ukuleles but not so good for me. Most songs written on the Treble Clef tend to be towards the upper end of my range. With a  few exceptions, even the ones I can sing comfortably don't allow me to make use of my lower range.

I can make much better use of my range if I move or transpose most melodies to suit. If you want to sing, you really want to learn how to transpose. Lots of songs you'll want to sing won't be in your range.

Oddly enough, since I'm singing a parallel octave below the Treble Clef, I can get to where I want to be by moving the notes up rather than down. You can see what I mean if we look at the Treble Clef. There is room for two G scales (If you click on the image you can see it larger).:

The ukulele can only play the second scale (this is also true for ukuleles tuned GCEA by the way). Since I will be singing a parallel melody well below the uke that doesn't make any difference for me. So all the music I will be practicing with will be moved up. I may put a few Fs and F#s in the mix but I'm going to transpose all the melodies I play and sing up into the range of the ukulele.

(This, by the way, is another advantage for D tuning for me. The range that parallels the range I can sing all fit pretty comfortably on this tuning.)

Monday Tune

When I first started I bought an ukulele and a book. The ukulele, a Mahalo, had serious intonation problems, and the book was for D tuning. After I had played a while, my ears got good enough that I noticed the problems with the Mahalo. So I started searching out more info on the ukulele and everyone told me that "no one tunes ADF#B anymore." I  thought I'd wasted my money on both.

The first person I ever heard defend D tuning was Joel Eckhaus. Here he is in action (unfortunately this gets cut of rather abruptly at the end but is still worth it):



I have always liked this interview he did a few years ago. This quote in particular:

I play standard and concert uke in ADF#B (which I call East-Coast-Up-Tight tuning), mostly because that’s the way Roy taught me. But after all these years playing that way, I’ve grown fond of that tuning. It fits my vocal range and my playing style, which is often hard and aggressive. GCEA (West-Coast-Slacker tuning) works well for those mellow Hawaiian Hulas. Some ukes sound better in one tuning or the other, depending on the resonant frequency of the box. I like to experiment and see which tuning sounds best on a uke.

East-Coast-Up-Tight Tuning! I think we should call FBbDG Southern-Sitting-On-The-Porch-Sipping-Bourbon tuning.

Anyway, his point about experimenting is a very good one. Your ears will tell you what tuning you like and the ukulele will tell you what suits it.

More basic assumptions

I've already said this but this whole project is based on the assumption that we've already been learning for a while and have a book and maybe even took a couple of lessons. This is about mastering basics and not about starting from scratch.

I'm also assuming that we'll keep playing and practicing whatever else we have been doing up until now.  It would be no fun practicing the basics of volleyball if we weren't allowed to keep playing games. I like to sit around and play and sing a few tunes every day just because it can be fun. (It isn't always fun because I struggle with some tunes I want to play.)

I will be putting some sort of organizing tools up that will enable people who find the site to go back and follow along in order at some point. The basic organizing principle is the "week". Because I started on a Saturday, all my weeks begin on Saturday.

Finally, I should add that this singing and playing at the same time is not some wild idea I came up with myself while chewing on peyote in an ashram in Siberia. It's actually a technique used in all sorts of musical pedagogy including the Suzuki method. It helps build a hard connection between our ear and what our hands and mouth are doing.

The big challenge for men ...

... singing with the ukulele is that we can't actually sing most of the notes the ukulele plays. Most women's voices overlap with the notes on the ukulele but we sing way below it. We sing notes that are the same but different. The same because we will (when we get it right anyway) sing Do, Re, Mi, etc. as we play Do, Re, Mi, etc. but we will be singing the same notes much lower.

Okay, here is a little written music. Don't worry, you don't need to be able to read music to understand the point here. All you need to grasp is that the lower the note is on the page the lower it is in real life. And all the notes on this staff are Gs. That's because the scale I'm going to work on first is G. I've picked G because it is a comfortable scale for me. So G is the "Do" for the scale I am going to practice playing and singing all next week.

Anyway, here is the music:

We'll start with the two notes immediately above one another on the far left. The higher note is the G the ukulele plays and the note way below it is the G I will actually sing. It will sound okay because it will be the same in a way that works. (I'll probably get to why that is at some point but for now I'll ignore.) Because it is the same note I will be able to tell whether I am getting it right by listening carefully and concentrating. When in doubt I'll check with my chromatic tuner but I'm going to make a point of weaning myself off of it.

The next two Gs on the musical staffs above are actually the same note written two different ways. The staff lets us do this with some notes. The thing I want to call attention to is that it is the highest G I will sing* and we can see here that even it is below the lowest note I will play on the ukulele. The final note on the right is the highest note the ukulele will play in the G scale.

So now let's play and sing a  G scale. How do you do that? Well you start on the second string from the bottom and you finger it at the first fret. That gives us for our first Do. Then you go up to the third fret and finger it and that gives us A for our Re. Then we jump to the first string from the bottom and pluck it without fretting it and that gives us B for our Mi. Then we fret that same string at the first fret and that gives us C or Fa.

That is half the scale. The remaining notes we need are D for our So, E for our La, F#** and another G for our final Do. After explaining this, our teacher just sat down, opened a rather lurid looking romance novel and said, "Figure it out for yourself.' So we will.

Then we'll play it slowly. Once we have that we'll play and sing it at the same time. And we'll do it over and over again until it's rooted in our brains.

And there is a rule: We'll think of it not as a scale but as music. We don't want to play and sing a boring old scale but a musical phrase.



 * I can sing the next octave above but it doesn't sound very good once I get above D. But even if I did that (which is where you will sing in the unlikely event that you are a tenor) every note you sing will still be below the notes the ukulele plays.

** If you decide to use your chromatic tuner to help work this out you may find that your chromatic tuner reads this note as Gb.

The next thing I did ...

... was to sing the whole scale. It's irresistible and there is no point in resisting.

And I noticed an odd thing. It was very hard to get to the point where I could play a note and sing the same one back but singing the scale once I had that starting point was easy. There are some days even now when I start off and I just don't have it and I have to work at focusing my ear and brain to do it. But once I've got that starting point I can usually sing a scale relatively easily.

It wasn't right on at first. I was often a half tone off by the end. I would start on G and end up on G flat or G sharp. But I quickly figured out that if I really concentrated I could do it. And I suggest that anyone who really wants to get the basics of singing and playing down do the same thing.

While doing it over and over again, I recommend doing a couple of things. The first is to start thinking about range. Some scales will be a real strain when you get to the top note and some will actually be painful. We don't want to sing those.

Related to that is the question of which Do do we want to start on? When I first started talking about the octave I mentioned that each and every octave starts and ends on a note that is the same only different. There is the low-Do we start on and the high-Do we finish on. The thing is that the low-Do we start on is also the end of another octave that is below the one we just sang. Likewise, the high-Do at the end can be used to start a new octave above.

So let's go ahead and do it for a while. And let's follow Ms. Frizzle's advice for now and "Take chances! Make mistakes! Get messy!" The only rule is: Stop any time it hurts to sing a note. Well, one more important rule: Actually do it. Find some place we can be alone with the computer and make noise.

Let's sing "Do" or "Doh"

As everybody probably already knows, it's pronounced "Doh" like Homer Simpson says.

But if we're going to start with basics, and this is what I started doing a little while ago, it can't get any more basic than playing and singing one note. Of course it has to be the right note.

How can we tell it is the right note? This is where a lot of self-teaching books may mislead you. They will tell you to simply check against your instrument. So you play a note then sing it and then check to see if you got it right by playing the same note again. But how do you know it's right or wrong?

You can, of course, simply ask someone for help. A good musician, especially a good singer, should be able to tell you right away. If they really are good that is. And they also have to be patient enough to listen while you flub it up again and again because the key to getting this right is doing it again and again.

Luckily there is a machine called a chromatic tuner that will do the job for you. If you have a Macintosh computer and it came with Garage Band installed you already have such a program. If not, search "online chromatic tuner" and you'll find lots of options. (You also need a computer equipped with a microphone. Most come with one built in these days.)

Once you have one,  hook it up and play with it a bit. Sing a note and see what the machine says. Then try another one and another one. When you are ready, play a note on your instrument and try singing the same note back.

And now we can begin what might be one of the most frustrating experiences of our lives. Some people will get a pleasant surprise and find they can do it. Lots of others will be like me and find they can't. But stick with it and you will get it. (Do it several times and days in a row just to make sure you didn't just get lucky the first time.)

Meanwhile here are a few helpful hints.

1. Start by humming not singing. Your brain determines whether two notes are the same by comparing vibrations. You can make your brain's job easier by making the vibrations stronger and humming does that.
2. If you, like I was, are all over the place when you first start, hold a note, any note, and then try moving it up or down to get closer to the note you want to reach.
3. But what if you can't control even whether you go up or down? Don't laugh. I couldn't when I first started. Try this, begin raising the note you are humming and raise your chin at the same time. Then try lowering your chin as you lower the note. I don't know why this helps but it does.
4. Walk away from the tuner every once in a while.  The tuner is an assist but we ultimately want to get to the point where we can do this without help. our big goal is to get to the point where we don't need anyone else to tell us whether we sound good because we can hear it for ourselves. Anyway, walk away and do it then come back and see if you got it right.

Then keep practicing until you can get it. This is perhaps the most frustrating part. It may take a long time. It took me weeks. It didn't help that I kept getting frustrated and giving up but it would have taken work even if I'd been more devoted.

Music theory: the octave

You could start your music theory anywhere you want but I think The Sound of Music got it right. Start with the octave.



For me the big barrier to getting this stuff is that it seems so familiar. It's like this particular arrangement of notes is embedded in our genes. And it probably is.

But there is stuff here that ought to seem downright strange but doesn't because we're too used to the octave. For example, why do the first and last steps have the same name? They are different notes, the second one is higher than the first. In fact these two notes are "differenter" than any other notes in the octave. They are farther apart than any other two.

Yes, there is an explanation for why they are really the same but I think the really important thing is not to get the science but the sound. Listen to the two Dos at the end of the scale and try and hear how they can be both different and the same.

Because being able to hear the way things can be different and the same at the same time strikes me absolutely central to western music.