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.


The only problem with the series, for me anyway, is that they move on to low fourth tuning rather than re-entrant and that makes a lot of sense in the classroom but I think re-entrant sounds better. As they go on, the Ukulele in the Classroom people put more and more pieces with notes below D in the mix.

Other options? As I said above, there are fewer and fewer people publishing books specifically for the Ukulele in D tuning. Total Ukulele D-Tuning Method for Beginners looks very promising to me. I don't own it but Amazon lets you look inside and it seems to have everything you'd want.

There is also a great piece of ukulele history that is still on the market in Mel Bay's Ukulele Method: for Chord and Melody Playing. It was written many years ago by one of the greatest ukulele players of all time: Roy Smeck. I do own this one and I can tell you that the most common criticism of it is true: it is very compressed. You will need to learn a whole lot just to understand what this book is trying to teach you. It's something you might buy as an additional book. (If you want it, get it quickly as it is bound to disappear or get rewritten for C tuning one of these days.)

Once you make the move to "additional books" one question you might want to ask is whether you need restrict yourself to books intended specifically for the ukulele. I mentioned earlier that it is important to learn basic songs. Well here is a secret worth knowing: every method whether for ukulele, guitar, piano or bagpipes tends to use the same basic songs and exercises. So one thing that is worth doing is looking for books for instruments that have a similar range to our ukulele.

I like recorder books. In fact, I am currently using a book for alto recorder—Method for Recorder by Mario Duschenes—as the source of my exercises. It even gives the chords for a lot of pieces. Soprano recorders also have a lot of material in ukulele range as do Tinwhistle books.

One huge advantage these books have over just about every ukulele book on the market (with the exception of the Ukulele in the Classroom series) is that they give you valuable hints for mastering complicated rhythms such as the dotted eighth-sixteenth note combinations above.