Play the Ukulele

Learn to Play the Ukulele

So, you have your very first uke and you’re itching to learn how to play the ukulele. You’re incredibly excited to play your very first song and your first inclination might be to start searching for an easy one to play. The first thing you’ll discover is that you’ll want to learn some chords before you decide what song to play. Songs are considered easy for a number of reasons, such as having the fewest number of chords, easy strumming patterns and simpler chord positions. So, what’s the most important one to learn to play the ukulele? To me it is songs with simple chord positions.

If you’re not used to playing a stringed instruments the complex ways you have to bend your fingers to press on the strings can be quite difficult to master. The uke only having four strings makes in simpler, but still moderately difficult. Most people have heard that there are three chords that will allow you to play hundreds of songs on the guitar. The same is true with the uke. If you learn how to form the G7, C, and F chords you can learn how to play the ukulele in no time.

If you learn those three chords you can play one of the funnest songs in rock history. You can play Twist and Shout by The Beatles. Don’t be discouraged if it takes you a while to be able to bend your fingers in the right way to hit the chords. Keep at it and practice going from each one to the other as you will need to do them in different orders to play different songs.

Once you have your three chords mastered it’s time to move on to the second most important part to learn how to play the ukulele; strumming. Strumming is the way that you strike the strings. It’s what gives the song rhythm. Many songs have unique strumming patterns, but before you try to learn them it’s necessary to learn how to keep steady time. Practice strumming the strings up and down over and over again at the same speed. A simple down, up, down, up strum pattern will work for a lot of easy songs, so keep at it and use a metronome if you need to. Once you have those three simple chords and can keep a steady beat with your strumming you are well on the path to learn how to play the ukulele.

Lady Gaga Ukulele Covers

I was going to do a general post on some currently popular songs that are being covered out there right now, but once I started looking around there were just too many so I decided to stick with one artist that you probably wouldn’t guess would be covered a lot on the uke–Lady Gaga. While her music is incredibly popular, you probably wouldn’t instantly connect is with the uke, but the many people out there doing Lady Gaga ukulele covers would disagree. I picked one cover for three different songs, but there are thousands more out there if you’re in the mood to look.

Just Dance Lady Gaga Ukulele Cover
Let’s start with this cover of “Just Dance” because it’s one of the most fun. The singer covered it on Halloween, hence the sailor moon costume.

Poker Face Lady Gaga Ukulele Cover
Where would a Gaga post be without Poker Face, of course. The girl doing this cover is a bit more timid than the one above, but still really fun and I’m in love with her big glasses and sweet voice. With this one I’d like to add that on this video here it’ll run you through how to play the ukulele cover of Poker Face.

Bad Romance Lady Gaga Ukulele Cover
This girl singing Bad Romance has the perfect voice for this song. Also, notice the amusing little “something in french” thrown in, haha.

Beatles Ukulele Covers

There are a lot of Ukulele videos online. A lot of them can be broken down by fun cover videos of people playing the songs, videos of adorable children rocking the songs, and videos that help teach you how to play the ukulele yourself!

This post is going to cover those three types of videos for you, with a Beatles theme.

We’ll start off with one of my fun favorites, this is a cover of “When I’m 64” by the Beatles, covered by a woman and her grandmother. The woman has a strong fun voice, the ukulele is loud and clear, and grandma is totally adorable. This is a great example of the fun you can have playing the uke!

Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da is one of my favorite Beatles songs, and this child rocks it. He plays the uke with confidence and he isn’t looking at his fingers the whole time, so you can tell he really knows what he’s doing and plays often. Playing often, and having a lot of fun, is the only way to really get confident enough to play with ease, as this child demonstrates.

Last we have this helpful video that teaches you how to play Yesterday by the Beatles. The video is nine minutes long and starts off with him playing the song for you, and then running you through a tutorial on how to play it yourself.

You can find videos just like these for pretty much any song you want to see played on the ukulele. Learning how to play songs you love, like those from the Beatles, is a great way to get yourself excited about playing and motivated to really learn how to do it well, and online videos are a great way to inspire yourself to keep going.

For another great Beatles Ukulele cover, from one of the great, check out the Learn How to Play the Ukulele post with Jake Shimabukuro playing a cover of The Beatles song “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”.