Play the Ukulele: Melodies, Chords, and Progressions from Beginning to Intermediate - Paperback

by Robert Anthony (Author)

Play the Ukulele is a book for people wanting to learn or improve upon their musical skill level, and is appropriate for beginning to intermediate ukulele players. While it is not intended to replace a professional instructor, ukulele players with even a small amount of prior musical experience will likely find the book to be intuitive. Musicians who play other instruments will likely be able to start wherever in the book they are comfortable, and can skip around the book to get what they need from it.

The purpose of this book is less about memorizing any particular piece of music, but more about acquiring a skill set that will allow the user of this book to learn music or songs of their choosing autonomously. C Tuning is used throughout this book, and the book is broken down into six sections:

SECTION 1 briefly goes over some of the basics of how to tune the ukulele, how to read tablature, and so on.

SECTION 2 is made of common melodies such as Jingle Bells, Ode to Joy, and so on.

SECTION 3 introduces melodies from the Classical repertoire.

SECTION 4 is all about chords, strumming finger-picking, and progressions used in pop, rock, blues, country, and jazz.

SECTION 5 goes deeper into Classical repertoire and includes two arrangements of each piece of music -- a single-note melody, and a much more challenging chord-melody arrangement. Music from Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Clementi, Debussy, Diabelli, Gurlitt, Handel, Haydn, Liszt, L. Mozart, W.A. Mozart, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Vivaldi, Wagner, and Weber is included.

SECTION 6 goes into more detail about reading standard notation, has a few tablature-to-notation drills to get you going, and then has 72 reading exercises to train your reading skill.