Starting a Ukulele Club/Session/Meetup, Part 0: Introduction

There are any number of books and web pages offering advice on forming a ukulele group. One reason for so many is that there's no one right way to go about it. It's subjective opinion, not objective fact, which is what prompts me to offer my own opinions and maybe, dare I say, insights.

Rather than do it all at once, I'm breaking these comments up into a series of notes, each addressing a different aspect of establishing a group.

• location, location, location
• leadership
• songbook
• types of groups, conduct of the sessions.

Starting a Ukulele Club, part 1: Location, location, location!

 [I am not a lawyer.  If this post raises questions for you, seek legal expertise locally.]

If there is to be a club, then it has to have a place to meet, preferably without having to pay a fee.

If I were in a new town and wanted to start a group, the

First place I'd try would be the local library. Libraries have always been supportive of small arts organizations. And that's what a ukulele club is--a small arts organization.
 
Second is a religious or community center. Churches often have community rooms that they make available to local organization.
 
Third is a bar, sandwich shop, or any other place with a public performance license. Any business that regularly offers music is a good bet.  However, be considerate. A business may be eager to support music groups, but if it doesn't know about license requirements, it may get a visit from ASCAP or BMI resulting in a fine, and threat of a lawsuit if the fine is not paid. If you do find a business that will host the meeting, it's a good idea to support them by ordering food items before, during, or after the meeting.

Public performance licenses are one reason why libraries and churches are excellent places to hold meetings.  A club meeting that is not open to the general public is not a public performance.



Important!  NEVER run over your allotted time, especially when the space is being provided by a business. Be sure the room is returned to the condition in which you found it and everyone is OUT THE DOOR by the time of the meeting's scheduled end.   A good rule is to never start a song within 15 minutes of the end of a meeting.  This allows plenty of time for conversation, stacking chairs, and doing whatever else is necessary to restore the room to order.  Nothing builds up resentment faster than keeping staff past the time they are being paid to work. 

How To Restring A (Soprano) Ukulele

Old joke:
Q: When should you change your ukulele's strings?
A: When you won't need to play it for 10 days!

It's been said that all jokes have a basis in fact. This one is no exception. New strings can stretch for up to 10 days. You'll find yourself retuning almost every time you pick up the instrument (and sometimes while you're still holding the instrument) until the strings settle in. This is NOT due to a fault in the strings or the instrument. It's the way new strings behave.

For soprano ukuleles, I have found that tugging on the strings before I tighten them helps them settle in a LOT faster, BUT

1. Don't overdo. The ideal is to have about two winds on the peg once the strings have settled in and
2. Do NOT tug on the 3rd string (the thickest one). Make it as snug as you can without raising its pitch before tightening.

Finally, if you play in GCEA, tune the uke to ADF#B. Both the uke and the strings should be designed to handle the increased tension.  The strings will slip but keep at it, checking every so often. You'll retune. The strings will keep slipping.  That's okay.  The idea is to get them to the point where they don't slip below GCEA. Make a final ADF#B tuning before going to bed. In the morning, the strings will have slipped a bit but will go into GCEA just fine. (As a further demonstration of the perversity of nylon/flurocarbon/nylgut strings, when the strings are dropped into GCEA, they will remember that they were tuned higher.  They will go out of tune sharp(!) for a short time until they settle in for real.

That part about going to bed is another way of saying let the uke sit for a bit.  I've used this technique to restring a uke in the morning and take it to a jam in the late afternoon.  Eventually, you should be able to, too, but see (1) above. Don't press too hard the first few times you try this.  With practice, you'll figure out the right amount of tugging needed.

Something like this technique may work for concert and tenor ukes, but I have no real experience with them except for the occasional concert uke. So, I'm afraid you're on your own here.

What key should I sing that song in?

While not uniquely a ukulele issue, the question often arises about the key a song should be sung in. The answer is not complicated, but it requires a critical piece of information What is the highest note that you can sing?

Once you know the highest note you can sing, the answer is

Choose the key that makes highest note in the song
as close or equal to the highest note you can sing, but no higher!

For example, the highest note I can sing comfortably is D above middle C. Now, we need a song. How about "By The Light Of The Silvery Moon"?

• The song is written in the key of C.
• The highest note in the song is F ("Your silvery beams will bring love dreams...")
• F is the fourth note in the C major scale (C-D-E-F), so...whatever key I sing the song in, the highest note will be the fourth note of the scale.
• Since D is the highest note I can sing, I look for the key in which the fourth note of the scale is D.
• That scale is A! (A-B-C#-D)

I'd begin by seeing how the song works in the key of A.

• If the highest note is a passing note, I might be able to choose my key based on the second highest note.
• If a song lives near its highest note, that is, most of the notes are high or there is a long passage of high note, I might have to pitch the song in a lower key (G or F).

Oh, those wonderful *%)!# diminished chords!

[This is a draft. It's a pretty good draft, but it is a draft nonetheless. It may undergo some revision before being finalized, but I don't expect it to change much.]

As a hobbyist guitar player, whenever I came across a diminished chord I'd skip it. Six strings and a chord that requires 4 fingers in a cramped position is something I did not need, thank you.

That said, the sound of the diminished chord is really nice. A ukulele has but four strings and the position isn't that bad when there are only four strings. While there are many ways to form the same chord, it's easy to argue that there are only 3 diminished chords, all of the same shape but on different frets. Each one of the diminished chords can be named by any of the four notes in it. So, for example, (0,1,0,1) contains the notes G, C#, E, Bb so it can be called Gdim, C#dim, Edim, Bbdim.

\

Chord	Notes
	G	C#/Db	E	A#/Bb
	G#/Ab	D	F	B
	A	D#/Eb	F#/Gb	C

What could be simpler? But, if it's so simple, why can't I remember it?!

The above table is correct. It has pictures of the chords and their notes. However, having thought about diminished chords and being frustrated by them for some time, I have now come to appreciate that, to master diminished chords, it is essential to know the first three frets of the fretboard as if by rote. As a result, I've become more enamored of this second table that displays the fret board:

Fret	Notes
0 (nut)	G	C	E	A
1	G#/Ab	C#/Db	F	A#/Bb
2	A	D	F#/Gb	B
3	A#/Bb	D#/Eb	G	C

It is even better, as we shall see, when four notes are removed from the display

Fret	Notes
0 (nut)	G		E
1	G#/Ab	C#/Db	F	A#/Bb
2	A	D	F#/Gb	B
3		D#/Eb		C

As was already mentioned, all that one has to do to obtain a particular diminished chord is move the diminished shape so that it covers the note naming the chord. For example, to obtain Bdim move the shape so that a finger covers a B somewhere. There's

string	fret	chord
1	2	1212
2	7	7878
3	11	10,11,10,11
4	4	4545

Notice that the diminished chord repeats itself every three frets. That is, if (f,f+1,f,f+1) is a particular diminished chord, then so is (f+3,f+4,f+3,f+4), where 'f' is a certain fret number.

Leaving the C and A out of the fretboard diagram was a breakthrough of sorts for me. Like most ukulele players, I've drilled it into myself that the ukulele is tuned gCEA, so, when looking for a C, I automatically think of the open third string. However, that doesn't work for diminished chords because there is no way to fret the first and third strings below the nut! 'C' is first string, third fret. Similarly, 'A' is fourth string, second fret. It is no accident that 'C' and 'A' are emboldened in the table.

Oh, those wonderful 9 chords!

As an amateur guitar player, I didn't have much use for 9 chords. However, they sound wonderful and become surprisingly manageable on a ukulele with its four strings.

If you check the chord building chart from the "Chords, and how to make them" note, you'll see that a 9 chord is just a 7-th chord with the 9-th note of the scale added. Think '2', but an octave higher.

Consider three cases:

• 
  Bb: the 7 chord is (1,2,1,1). The 9 note is C. There is a C on the third fret of the first string, making the Bb9 (1,2,1,3)...which makes it sound a lot harder than it is! Keep the bar! That is, finger the Bb7 the usual way by using the index finger as a bar across all four strings and your middle finger fretting the second fret of the third string. Add your ring finger to the third fret of the first string and you've got it!

  This is a moveable chord. For example, when you move your index finger one fret up the neck to (2,3,2,4) and you've got B9!

• 
  D: the 7 chord is (2,2,2,3). The 9 note is E. There is an E to be found on the third string, fourth fret, making the D9 (2,4,2,3)...which makes it sound a lot harder than it is! If you finger your D7 by using your index finger as a bar on the 2-nd fret and your middle finger at the 3-rd fret of the first string, then all you need do is add your ring finger at the 4-th of the third string.

  This is a moveable chord. For example, when you move your index finger down the neck and let the nut take its place, you have C9=(0,2,1,0).

• 
  E: the 7 chord is (1,2,0,2). The 9 note is F#. There is an E to be found on the second string, second fret, making the D9 (1,2,2,2), which again can sound a lot harder than it is! Two ways to obtain the E9 are by using four finger tips and by barring the first three strings at the second fret with the middle finer, say, and arching the index finger to fret the fourth string. However, since the E9 has the first three strings fretted at the second fret, it doesn't matter what is done with them on the first fret. So, a what some find as a much easier way to form the E9 is by barring all of the strings across the first fret with the middle finder and all four strings across the first fret with the ring finger.

  This, too, is a moveable chord.

The best software for ukulele players: Songbook

It would be unthinkable for a series on software for ukulele players to not include Songbook, not just because it does what it does, but also because it is available on so many platforms, including iPhone/iPad, Android, Windows, and Mac OS X. Songbook can be synchronized across your devices by using Dropbox or any other program that will keep files and directories synced. (I use BitTorrent's Sync, myself. Sync is different from the BitTorrent service for peer-to-peer file sharing because no peers are involved in Sync other than your own.)

If a songsheet is in two-line format, Songbook can convert it into the chordpro format it needs to work its own magic. Songbook can do everything necessary to create a personal songbook or a songbook for a ukulele club. Songbook can

• convert files from chordpro to the easier to read two line text format,
• transpose to a different key on the fly or permanently, and
• add chord diagrams.

Highly recommended!

There are a few downsides. While I have not seen the program's source code, it is my sense that it recreates an index of song titles every time it is started. I am also guessing that it sorts the titles into alphabetical order and does it in an inefficient manner. I have more than 9,000 (nine thousand; not a typo) chordpro files. Songbook takes so long on to start on my tablets that it is easy to think that the program has frozen. As I type this, I realize that I don't like the inherent ambiguity in the phrase "so long", so I grabbed my older Asus MeMo ME301T and newer Samsung Tab A. It took 75 seconds for a list of song titles to appear on the MeMo and 70 seconds on the Tab A.

The other is for people like me who prefer to store song files in a directory structure rather than create playlists. Songbook for Android supports only one level of subdirectories. For example, if your chordpro files were stored in a directory called ChordPro, that directory could be subdivided into Rock, Pop, and Jazz, say, but Songbook would not be happy if Rock were subdivided into 60s, 70s, and so on.

SongBook costs $8 for Android, $19 for PC ($17 if you already own Android), $8 for iOS, $18 for Mac.