Welcome to the Tourist’s Guide!
The Tourist’s Guide teaches ukulele from the perspective of basic humans with minimal exposure to music training or maximum frustration with music performance and helps people “get on the bus” . . . playing and singing with others.
My mission is to help people play without first learning to read music. Reading music can be a handy skill—especially for researching songs—but it isn’t and shouldn’t be a pre-requisite to enjoying the ukulele.
Currently this site is for use mainly by my students. I hope someday soon to expand it to include a blog about teaching and learning and the basics of my approach to teaching music theory through the ukulele.
Tuesday Ukuleles in Yellow Springs, Ohio
There are ukulele groups everywhere. Tuesday Ukuleles meets weekly—on Tuesday of course—from 10-11:30 am, at the Yellow Springs Senior Center. The group is led by Susan Wolf.
Songs are chosen by group members because we like them or because the song would be entertaining for people to listen to and sing along with. We display lyrics and chords on a big TV screen, and also offer the songs on paper.
This an all level group. We play in a variety of styles. We do work on some skills—like special strums or how to speed up a particular chord change—when a song needs it. Mostly, we sing, strum and have fun.
IF YOU DON’T KNOW HOW
If you haven’t played ukulele before, or just don’t feel ready to play in a group, a free three-session class can be arranged to get you started. The class comes with a beginner book to help play at home as you’re learning.
Lesson Summaries
ON TUESDAY 01.14.25 WE TALKED ABOUT/WORKED ON:
FINGERPICKING
There is interest in learning fingerpicking.
We worked on the alternating thumb picking pattern. I’ll have a worksheet for this next Tuesday when we work on it again. (So named because your thumb alternates between the G and C Strings.)
HOW TO PLAY AS A FOUR-BEAT STRUM:
Beat One, play the G string with your thumb moving down (towards your foot)
Beat Two, play the E and A Strings at the same time, plucking up towards your chin. Your index finger is on the E string and your middle finger is on the A string.
Beat Three, play the C string with your thumb, moving down towards your foot
Beat Four, repeat Beat Two instructions
I WILL ASK YOU NEXT WEEK
a) An idea for one Christmas song that you really like and we haven’t sung before. We’ll work on one per week beginning about July/August. I need it now so I can do research and learn songs before we start working on them in class.
b) 1-6 Beatles songs you like. This is in preparation for our mid-year public singalong.
BEATLES
We did a quick try-out on four Beatles songs.
Eleanor Rigby (a 2-chord song)
Hey Jude
In My Life (a lot of chords!)
Yellow Submarine
Those four are attached. I’m not making copies yet because they are still in the “proofreading” and “how do we want to sing this?” stage.
MY GOAL FOR THIS YEAR
The reason I’m trying to organize in advance is to make class smoother and even more fun as time goes by . . . to do that it’s a big help for me to have an idea what we will be working on well in advance so that I can make the song sheets less “rough-drafty” and I will already know the melodies when we start singing them.
WHAT’S NEW
I’m planning to stay until noon so that if you have specific questions, things you, individually, want help understanding or working on, we can do that after class. Please reserve time by emailing me in advance, so I can ready to be helpful.
Lyrics and Chords for a Song We Are Working On.
Useful Web Links
Links to Skills:
Alternating Thumb Pick
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mACJEWzpAM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKtPE3HfL5c
Harmony Singing: