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.