Learning the Ukulele

I've wanted to learn the ukulele for a while now because I had heard that learning the ukulele is easy and fun and doesn't really take much time. I find it a huge stress reliever to have a hobby that uses my hands, but knitting never appeals to me in the heat of summer. Plus, I really miss having music in my life (I played clarinet in high school!), so the ukulele sounded perfect. I sort of forgot about it for a while. Then, when we took Coco to see her first movie, Inside Out, earlier this summer, Pixar released the sweetest short film, Lava, right before the movie. Lava is an animated story told through a really sweet ukulele song. I was sold. 

I came straight home and ordered a simple ukulele, tuner and an instructional book! In all honesty, I would probably skip the book and just use You Tube if I were to do it again, but the tuner is an absolute must have! In the first few days, you have to tune your ukulele a lot as the strings stretch out and wear in a bit. Having a tuner means faster tuning and more fun playing.

It's amazing to pick it up, learn a few chords and be playing in no time. For me, the hardest thing is to keep the strumming pattern going through chord changes and I had to develop some callouses. Ouch! So far, I still can't play and sing at the same time, but I'm working on it! J is quite the natural and I love the soft strumming that tends to fill our evenings now. We pour some wine or open our favorite summer beer and chat as he strums and I make dinner while the kids play. It's pretty dreamy!