KAME Week 9 ukulele post : beyond theory and into practical, expressive playing

The critical learning point for ukulele this week was the song “happy place” that we learnt (or taught ourselves) in class. This was tied into the ‘informal learning’ contemporary pedagogy theme of the week which looks at the ways in which modern popular music musicians learn, perform and convey musical ideas, namely through listening, learning and imitating. After learning one song as a class, James directed us to teach ourselves “happy place” which utilised mostly the same chords as the first song we had learnt. It became clear that by allowing us to learn a song on our own after learning another song with similar chords, James was demonstrating how a music educator can be a facilitator rather than strictly a teacher. 

As I have spoken about in my last post, by teaching the song to myself, I was able to proactively absorb the music and learn the details of the structure, chord progressions, strumming patterns and even the expressive technique of muted strumming used in the verses. All of this information made a greater impact on me since I had actively paid attention to the song to work it out by the quarter to 10 deadline James gave us to learn the song and play it with the class. In terms of learning the chords and choosing shapes, I also further consolidated my recent decision to stick to shapes that are as close as possible to the headstock, not going too far up the frets as this cuts off a lot of resonance and the closer together frets require more accuracy to avoid awkwardly fretting a note incorrectly. For my semi big hands this is especially important.