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.