Singing to yourself

The other day, I walked right up main street singing to myself. That isn't an unusual thing. For me I mean.

But it hit me that a lot of the singing we do is useless for actually developing our voices. For I sang quietly as I always do when singing to myself. I didn't want anyone to hear me.

Real singing shouldn't be like that. For starters, how are we going to learn to sing on key if we can't even hear ourselves? And what is the point of singing if no one can hear us?

Monday Tune(s)

This is an hour-long video from the 2006 NY Uke Fest. What i especially like about it is Spats White. Spats is, by his own account, an opinionated cuss and he got right into the thick of a major fight between people who like traditional uke repertoire and those who like to more modern stuff. This uke fest is heavily loaded in favour of the traditional fare and I have to admit that is what I prefer.

A new book for D tuning

D tuning is increasingly becoming associated with James Hill. He has put together a new book called Great Popular Songs: 20 Timeless Tunes Compiled and Arranged for Ukulele.

The first thing you should know is that these popular songs are the usual suspects. They are good, basic songs with the sort of intervals that give you a basis for playing everything else. You will not find any Lady Gaga here. You can see why if you go to this video that teaches you how to play the latest Lady Gaga song Judas. Two things will become obvious to you if you watch it is that the song. First, like almost all current pop, consists of the same simple patterns repeated over and over again. It's easy to learn. But you will also notice that our teacher in the video is very careful to never actually sing the words of the song or hum more than little snatches of melody. That's because she doesn't want to get sued.

The simple songs in learning books are no different really. They just happen to be public domain so no one gets sued. And they actually are great tunes. If you listen to them carefully as you sing and play them, you'll notice that these melodies tend to turn up in newer popular songs quite often.

Okay, digression over, back to James Hill's book. The big thing for D tuning learners is that it's all set up for us (just make sure you order the D6 tuning edition). It's got all the chord shapes you need. You can play the melody too and example they have on-line can be played entirely with re-entrant (high 4th) tuning. That's good. They should be pretty easy to sing and play and memorize if that is what you want to do.

James Hill explains his reasons for picking these songs here and here.

Verdict: I if were just starting, I would have ordered this immediately. I'm less than fond of the heavy dose of partisan politics some of the "folk" music in these collections inevitably includes but I could live with that.

Not much activity

I'm working on singing and ear training every day but not much to post about.

By ear training, I mean playing individual notes or sequences of notes and then singing them back and trying to get it bang on every time. It's going pretty well.

I forgot a Monday tune this week so here are a couple both by the Kingston Trio to make up for that. These are the only Kingston Trio songs I really like but I think the group deserve more credit than they get, if only for refusing to get political. I wish others had had similar good sense.

The second of these is more famous in the Frank Sinatra version but this one, while not as great as Frank's, is pretty darn good. Both would, I think, make good tunes for ukulele.

Progress report

One of the shocking discoveries I have made about songs is that we don't really know melodies nearly as well as we think we do. There are songs we know and love and that we think we know very well. Why we have heard them thousands of times, we even own a copy that we can play on the sound system any time we want. But try and sing it and we find out we don't really have it.

(By the way, when someone who normally can sing on key suddenly goes off key, I suspect that more often than not it is because he or she really doesn't know the melody of the song they are singing.)

So, anyway, after losing a week of practice to construction, I spent this week realizing that I didn't really have the melody to the Doxology down and have been working mostlyon that.

Now to memorize the chords and words.

Behold a new thing

I got a new ukulele. I traded my old Oscar Schmidt OU5 for it.

It hurt to part with the OU5 because it was the first uke with good intonation I ever had. It was one of my best teachers and I highly recommend the Oscar Schmidt ukes. But it had a laminate top rather than solid would and when I got another concert uke, a Mainland with a solid mahogany top, its sweeter and louder sound was so much nicer I simply stopped playing the OU5. I kept it around a full year because I have such fond memories to go with it.

My first ukulele was a Mahalo. I can't recommend Mahalos because the intonation on a lot of them is so bad. Mine was twenty cents sharp by the third fret and that is really bad.

So it may come as a surprise to find I traded my OU5 for a Mahalo. For this one:

That is a LTD2 model. Mahalo make (or commission others to make) a whole lot of cheap ukuleles but with the LTD2 they decided to make a good one. And, at least in the case of the one I have, they succeeded in a big way. It has a solid mahogany top. The intonation is good (I took my chromatic tuner with me and checked before taking it).

Best of all, this ukulele barks. That is to say it has an aggressive percussive bark that is really lovely when you strum it. To my mind that is the the quality you want in a  soprano ukulele. The larger ukes have lots of virtues but they can't give you that. If you can find a soprano with good volume, good intonation and bark, you've got it made in the shade.

It's also a lovely size. It's about as small as a soprano can get and it cradles in your arms like a baby.

Neat counting trick

I've always struggled with dotted rhythms that require me to play notes on the "and" or off beats.

Dotted half notes in four time are easy. You just play four three beats. But a dotted quarter note followed by an eighth note is a pain. You count one and puck the note and then continue through "and" then "two" and then play the next note on the next "and". That always throws me.

If I just play by feel I can get it provided I already know the melody. But what happens when I'm trying to learn a new melody?

The Recorder book I use as a source of melody playing exercises has a neat trick that helps a lot. Just count twice as many beats. So if the song is in four, you count eight. That way a dotted quarter note is just like a dotted half followed by a quarter note.

You practice that slowly until you have it, then you start counting with ands again.

Monday Tune

This is Jardin d'Hiver by Keren Ann Zeidel who wrote it. It was a huge hit in French markets when it came out about a decade ago now. I think it calls out for an ukulele version.




A couple of details worth noting. It's a thirty-two-bar song, which is to say it is the  classic American song form used by Berlin, Gershwin, Porter and company.

The song is about wanting to be in love for life and it was written by a beautiful young woman (Keren Ann) for an old and distinguished singer named Henri Salvador. It was his last big hit and not a bad way to go out if you ask me.

The Jardin d'Hiver (a winter garden) is a metaphor for the kind of love she wants. The song consists of a list of desire for things. Both times (the thirty-two bar chorus is sung through twice with different words) the list begins with a request for a certain kind of light. "Soleil vert" is literally green sunshine and the second time it is a request for the sort of light they get in New England. Then it goes to a long list of nostalgia items.

It's a song about marriage, about a desire for a lifelong commitment. "Je voudrais toujours te plaire", means "I would like to always please you." A classic subject in a classic form.

UPDATE:I'm not the only person to think of this. There are at least two versions on You Tube. One of which features and out of tune ukulele. And then there is the following. I don't think is quite an ukulele version. It sounds like someone playing ukulele along to a recording but it's okay:

What I am doing and ongoing series

Despite the upset here, I continue to practice. I have not made much progress on learning and memorizing The Old Hundredth yet. I have the right key, D, and I've played it though and sung it quite a few times but I've yet to simplify the chords or memorize anything. I'd better get really going on this soon.

A Monday Tune follows.

Lousy Day

I didn't get to practice at all to day. We had trades in here doing construction tasks since early this morning and then I had all sorts of chores. The ukulele didn't even get out of its case. I hate it when that happens.

Let's look at the music

Here is the Old Hundredth the way it is usually written.

Click on the image to see it larger.

Now one thing is obvious and that is that I will want to transpose this so I'm not singing in the sub-basement to hit the lowest notes. But that is the easy part. I think I'll kick it up to the key of D.

The more difficult thing is all those %$#&ing chords. Why does such a  simple melody need such a lot of chord changes?

The mystery deepens when you consider that all of the chords used are diatonic chords for the key of G. That is to say, they are all the most obvious, basic chord choices possible. If they were adding colour and interest it would be easy to accept all the changes but they aren't. They are, in fact, making the melody drab and boring. So why are there?

The answer is that they are there as a crutch for the congregation. If you check—and I have—you'll notice that every single melody note is somewhere in the accompanying chord. This makes it very easy for a group of amateur singers to sing along and all stay on the melody. The church organist, meanwhile, was paid enough that he or she could be expected to make all the changes without any trouble.

But for our purposes, the hymn will be more challenging and interesting and beautiful if we can dump some of these chords. But which ones? There I am a bit challenged. I know it can be done and I've seen others do it but I don't really know how to do it myself. So I'll have to see if I can figure it out.

Monday Tune

An announcement. I see that other learners, and even some already accomplished players like Victoria Vox, have committed to learning one song a week or one song every two weeks. Anyway, I'm going to do the same. I'm going to do it historically. I am going to be gin with the very first songs the colonists sang and work my way up to the 1970s. Obviously, I won't get all the way in one year.

And I'm only going to do two songs a month.

The first song for April is a song the colonists brought with them, "The Old Hundredth" also known as the "Doxology".

Here is someone else doing it in C tuning):