Welcome to the Tulsa Ukulele Club Website

Welcome to the Tulsa Ukulele Club website. We are a group of people of all ages who enjoy playing the ukulele. We welcome every level of player from beginner to professional. We play a wide variety of music, as diverse as our membership. Right now, if you come to one of our meetings you are going to hear a lot of old time standards, country, folk and blues, possibly some Gospel, but we are welcome to new influences.

While our emphasis is on ukuleles, we welcome other instruments too. Bring your harmonica or guitar and of course, a kazoo is always welcome.

We are a family oriented organization and encourage the entire family to attend, even the little guys, so long as they do not disrupt the meeting. Watch this site for special announcements for meetings when we will be offering free beginner's ukulele lessons.

We have been evaluating several alternative sites for our meetings. Watch the blog postings below for the latest meeting place. At this time (10-17) we are meeting in the lobby of the Cancer Center of America in the first Thursday, have an Open Mike Night and jam on the second Thursday at Burgundy Place and the other Thursdays are jams at Burgundy Place or some other location. Check the blog, the web page or contact us for latest plans.

Thank you for visiting our Blog. You will also find a lot of useful links for songs and instruction material in the Handy Links section on the right side of the page.

We also have a web page that contains a lot of the songs in our song book -- see https://sites.google.com/site/tulsaukuleleclub/

We also have a YouTube channel and a Facebook page ("Tulsa Uke Club").

Please contact us if you have any questions at tulsaukes@gmail.com.







Friday, December 23, 2011

Let's do it!


There will be some folks who will be getting ukes this holiday season, so let's contact them and bring them to our January meetings to get them started.

Friday, December 9, 2011

White Christmas, with enhancements

Some of you may know of Jim D'Ville, the uke instructor who teaches "playing the uke by ear", versus using song sheets.  He gives workshops around the country and always has a crowd in his classes.  He also has a (free) blog that you might find useful.

http://playukulelebyear.blogspot.com/

One of the recent entries in his blog is on White Christmas.  Find it by scrolling down a few entries.  His version of the song starts with a simple, but acceptable, three chord arrangement in the key of C, i.e.,  C, F, and G7 then adds Dm to spice it up a bit, then in version #3 adds two more, C7 and Fm for a very nice arrangement and finally for #4, adds B, F#7 and Gdim.

 F#7 is the only one that you might have trouble fingering -- I expect you will find the others are easy and familiar.  And if that is a bit too much, you can simply delete that chord (in two places) and use the G7 as shown in version #3.

The notations are using the Circle of Fifths system, so if you want to do it in, say the key of F, you can substitute F for I, Bb for IV and so forth.  But in this blog, he shows the chord fingerings in the familiar key of C

Check it out and let's see if we can see how this goes on Dec. 13.


Ralph

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Beginner videos

We all learn in different ways, and for many, it is instructional videos.  The musician in the video will have his or her individual style and assumption on how fast you can pick up his/her tips.  Personally I find that many generally go a bit too fast for me, but this is a personal opinion.

Jeff Burton has started to make several beginner videos for the real beginner and if you are in that group, you might find his style is slow and easy to comprehend.

Here is his link.  He has 5 beginner videos out at this time.  If you are starting out, you might like his style.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC8A8A4D91F4D40A4