Uke Navigator Blog
You’ll find lots of helpful tips about learning to play the ukulele as well as insights about practice, equipment, and music theory. From fundamentals to fingerstyle, we’ll explore it all!
Hand and Finger Stretches
Stretching your hands, wrists, and fingers before you play is an important part of your preparation time. These brief stretches will help improve your playing and make you more comfortable too!
Exercises for Your Fingers
Exercising your fingers will help build strength and dexterity for chording and fretting notes. These two exercises are simple to do and can start your practice time with a good warm up.
The Relationship Between Keys, Notes, and Chords
As you begin to learn the ukulele you may wonder what the relationship is between keys, notes, and chords. How do they fit together and which do I need to learn? In this post we'll reveal the secrets of keys, notes, and chords!
What’s the Big Deal About Choosing Strings?
There are so many different types of strings for your ukulele, how do you choose what's right for you? Here are a few things to consider when choosing ukulele strings.
Exercises to Make Chords Easier to Play
Learning so many chord shapes in the beginning of your ukulele journey can be overwhelming. But, your fingers can build "muscle memory" to help you move from chord to chord seamlessly. In this post, we'll look at two simple yet effective exercises to help you learn and remember ukulele chords.
Reading Chord Diagrams
Reading ukulele chord diagrams is not difficult to learn and it opens up the number of songs you can play. Since lead sheets and fake books use chord diagrams you can learn to play songs using this "music navigation tool". This quick summary will provide what you need to know to read any chord diagram, no matter how complex!
The Magic of Chord Progressions
Learning songs is the fun part of playing the ukulele. What if you could figure out the chords to your favorite song using chord progressions and chord families? In this post, we'll dip our toes into chord progressions and show how learning chord families can be a great shortcut for learning songs - like magic!
Practice vs Playing. What’s the Difference?
We love to play the uke, but practicing is different and we need to practice to play better! In this post we'll explore the difference between practicing and playing the uke and review a few tips on how to practice.
Three Great Practice Techniques for the Ukulele
Practicing the ukulele can be fun but it can also be challenging when you start to learn more complex chords melody notes, and tempos. There are few tried and true methods that help any level player overcome fingering and tempo challenges: Slow, Loop, and Chain. Find out how these three techniques can improve your playing.
Barre Chord Cheat Sheet
Barre chords are always a challenge for beginning and improving players. We all go through this time of buzzes and thuds! With a little practice and some simple exercises you'll find that barre chords on the ukulele are within your reach.