KAME Week 8 (little late!) ukulele post

This week was a quiet one. This week’s class was tied into the comprehensive musicianship theme which I spoke about in the most recent prior post here. We learnt a song by an Indigenous Australian musician which wasn’t revealed until near the end of class. It was a strong example of the comprehensive musicianship theme as James spoke to us about the issues of cultural appropriation and using music with strong themes in the classroom, in this case of protest and social issues etc. 

As is the case so far, each week we learn a new song or two and discuss a few ideas related to that week’s contemporary pedagogy, and each week I have built a more practical approach to playing the ukulele. In particular, just using chord shapes that are physically achievable. It escapes me in which week I learnt this, but I did show James an incredibly complex shape for a G dominant 7th chord and he explained to me that you can simply take a major shape (in this case we were using a guitar D chord shape) to play the G, then ‘inverting’ it to replace the tonic with the flat 7th. After exploring this shape I realised that the fretted notes did not include a tonic. However, it occurred to me that in the context of an ensemble, a high register instrument does not necessarily have to hold down the tonic. I won’t bother posting a screenshot of my new chord chart, but suffice to say that some of the shapes for the various 7th chords don’t actually include a tonic, only the third, fifth and seventh.