It dawned on me recently that even though I’ve bought pretty much all of Al Wood’s ukulele ebooks, I’ve never actually written a review or talked about them before. So here goes, I’ve picked my favourite of the bunch out – How To Play Blues Ukulele…
What You Get For Your Money
For $17 you get 134 page ebook and a bunch of supporting audio and video files to play along with and learn from. Basically every example in the book has a supporting video and audio file for you. The videos serve as a guide to help you with the concepts and the audio files double this up but there are also some backing tracks for you to play over which are great if you’re looking to work on your scales for example, or maybe to help improve your improvising.
Who Is It For?
- Blues Scale in A The diagram below shows the notes of the blues scale in A, in the first position: You can play any of these notes, in any order, to create a blues solo in the key of A: All of the open strings 1st and 2nd strings at the 3rd fret 3rd string at the 2nd and 3rd fret.
- Birth Of The Blues. 272 Black Is Black.
- Welcome to the Happy Ukulele Songbook This songbook contains 52 of my favorite songs for the uke, from beginner to intermediate level, gathered over the past couple years since learning to play this magical instrument. I also created a special introductory section with tips and tricks based on the popular ukulele workshops I.
How To Play Blues Ukulele Pdf Free
The book starts out at around beginner level dealing with shuffle strumming and getting straight into a standard 12 bar blues pattern in the key of C. If you know a few chords, can strum a bit then you should be good to go with this book. It doesn’t quite start at zero but it’s pretty close.
How To Play Blues Ukulele Pdf Download
Ukulele tablature (tab) is a very easy to understand and useful way of notating ukulele music. It allows you to read and notate melodies without being able to read music, and it shows you exactly where to play it on your ukulele fretboard. The four horizontal lines represent the strings of your uke. What you get: A 78 page PDF file, 84 mp3 files, a printer-friendly pdf file, 7 pdf files containing scale and chord patterns. Download size: 27.3MB. To learn more about these file types and download a test file, visit our FAQ page. If you have any questions not answered there, please contact me here. How to Play Blues Ukulele.
In total there are 23 main sections which start with blues patterns and strumming before moving onto riffs, techniques, scales and improvising. It’s well thought out and has a natural flow.
Playing Challenges
At the end of each chapter/section you get a round up of what has been covered and some playing challenges too. I really like the playing challenges which push you beyond just playing through the progressions in the book. These challenges can be anything from transposing a progression to coming up with and playing your own bend licks.
I think one of the main things that I really like about this book is that it’s really comprehensive. There’s a lot to work on here and it’s not something you’re likely to blast through in a couple of weeks. I myself keep coming back to it and still wouldn’t say that I’ve got to grips with everything here.
Design/Presentation
The book is well designed and nicely presented and with it being delivered in PDF format you can obviously zoom in and out should you want things a little bit clearer. That’s maybe one criticism I might level at the layout/presentation, I think the text size could maybe do with increasing throughout. Maybe that’s just me though as I do tend to read on my phone quite a bit (and most people think that is just plain weird).
Everything here is (excluding the cover) is set on a white background which is a smart move. Not enough ebooks do this and are difficult to print as a result. That’s not the case here. If you want to print it out (and I’d recommend you do) it’s not going to consume all your printer ink.
Final Thoughts
This is a great ebook that I’d definitely recommend even if you have a passing interest in playing the blues on your ukulele. I wouldn’t particularly consider myself a big blues fan but I got (and still get) a lot from the book. It’s so packed with information and ideas that I think pretty much everyone will find something useful here. A definite buy recommendation from me!
Buy How To Play Blues Ukulele
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