Beginner Ukulele Thoughts

I got a few ukulele-related questions after my posts on how I made $1000/week working 5 minutes a day (here and here). So I thought I’d give some quick advice on getting into the ukulele.

The audience for this post is non-musicians who like the idea of having something they could play and sing along to. The easiest instrument to do that with is probably the ukulele. You can get proficient enough to play 100s of songs in about an hour. It won’t be every song you want to play, but with just a few chords you’ll have options for a bunch of different songs to play.

Which Uke to Buy

I’m not going to direct you to the nicest ukulele with the richest sound, I’m going to direct you to the ones that I find easiest to play and keep in tune.

If money isn’t an issue, I’d go with The Flea Ukulele by the Magic Fluke Company

One of these will be up around $300. It’s got a wood and plastic body. It’s sturdy and does not go out of tune easily.

If you want something cheaper, I also like the Enya Concert Ukulele

This is under $100 box and has a carbon fiber body.

If you want a cheaper or more traditional looking ukulele, just search on Amazon and check the reviews. Anything with good reviews will be decent enough for people like you and I who don’t really care too much about having the “perfect” sound.

Learning

If you want to invest money in the learning process, then I find Yousician to be a worthwhile app. It’s a video-game-ified way to learn an instrument. It’s probably not the best way to learn, but it might be the most fun, especially if you’re a non-musician..

If you don’t want to spend money there are beginner ukulele lessons all over youtube.

I, personally, don’t find easier to learn this sort of thing from a video than just reading about it. I would recommend searching for “basic ukulele chords” and then just learning the first few they give you.

Here’s a page with four simple chords and a bunch of songs you can play with just those chords.

More Songs

To find more songs to play, I recommend this site, Betty Lou’s Guitar Tab.

The good: There are 1000s of songs on there with easy arrangements.

The bad: To make the music easy to play, she only uses a handful of chords. So she’s simplified the song and in many cases it won’t end up sounding exactly like the original (unless the original was simple to begin with).

But it’s good to have the option to play songs you know, even if they don’t sound 100% perfect.

So the way I would learn, if I were you, is to learn some basic chords (as linked to in the last section). Then use this Betty Lou site to search out songs you want to play and when you find a chord you don’t know, look up how to play it, and add it to your repertoire of chords.

You can do it the other way too, you can tell this site what chords you know, and it will tell you what songs you can play with those chords.

Once you have a couple dozen chords down, you can use a site like Ultimate-Guitar to get versions of the songs that are closer to the original.

And you can search around youtube and see if there’s a teacher on there you connect with. As I said, I find it a bit of a pain to learn from youtube because they’re usually going slower (or sometimes faster) than I want to go. But it might work well for you.

That’s about all the advice I can give. It should be enough to get you started out and after that you’ll find your own path.