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Fun & games, lotsa learnin' and a new book FREE this week only 
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It’s Rocktober, and who better to celebrate with than one of rock’s great guitarists, Brain May of Queen fame, who designs ukuleles and acoustic guitars based on his legendary Red Special electric guitar. Have a look in his shop if you’d like to see more.
Fun & games that are good for your noggin!
At the most recent Newcastle Ukulele Festival, in October 2016, I presented a workshop on music and the brain which involved a discussion of music’s beneficial effects on brain function, with ukulele-based exercises for taking advantage of these benefits.

One of the exercises asked participants to write a chorus - given a few simple chords and three words or themes to base it on - in ten minutes. People formed into groups of around seven, and to my great delight, came up with not only choruses, but whole songs encompassing humour, personal experience, sadness, joy and deep meaning.

Fine motor activity, listening, visual and social skills as well as engaging a variety of neuronal networks involved in creative endeavour gives the brain a comprehensive workout in this exercise. If you’d like to try it for yourself or in a group, here are the sheets I gave out at the workshop.

Local former primary school teacher and now schools ukulele teacher, Dianne Murray, modified the exercise for use with some of her students. They have had great fun expressing themselves creatively and musically with a topic as the catalyst.

If you would like to try out the exercise with young students, I’ve made kid-specific sheets with a different group of chords on each one, but the same list of topics to choose from. You will know what your own students are interested in and are capable of playing, but the sheets are a guideline and a starting point.
 
Another exercise which gave me a lot of satisfaction (as a left-handed player), was asking people to flip their ukes 90 degrees - so they were playing them left-handed, or in one case right-handed, with the strings A E C G. They then had to play the chorus to the Beatles song Help (Am, F, D7, G). I’ve never seen accomplished ukers concentrate so hard or look so frustrated or so quickly dissolve into helpless laughter. It’s like learning a completely new skill, so there is a vast array of cross-hemisphere mental activity involved. Try it with the Help chords or your own favourite song!
 
Music is a profession in which there are many outstanding proponents with serious visual impairment or complete blindness. Reading music or chord lyric sheets becomes irrelevant and even describing to a blind student how to form ukulele chord shapes requires language that must be meaningful to the student. Without vision, musicians develop their own set of skills for playing, listening, learning and memorizing.

If you’re sighted, try the following exercise for a tiny glimpse into understanding how you might have to approach playing ukulele if you couldn’t see: pick a song or chord progression you know well, close or blindfold your eyes, and play it. If that’s do-able, try to play along to a recorded song you like (but haven’t played before) with eyes closed/blindfolded. Do this exercise often and you might start to develop a few new skills!
Teach the basic skills, then let 'em go for it!
Victorian high school music teacher Henry Vynhal has developed a project in Term 2 for his Year 7 and 8 students, which, after a ‘boot camp’ of gaining music skills in Term 1, has at its core the self-expression mentioned in the song writing exercise. ‘Personal Project’ sounds like the best fun you could ever have at school whilst inadvertently learning a host of musical and life skills. It involves everything from composing, performing and recording, to choreographing, filming and editing video clips, in groups, individually and combining a lot of technology-based tasks. As he says:

I was amazed at the ability of many students, particularly girl friendship groups who organize themselves into rap and music video routines. Remembering pages and pages of rhyme and its intricate percussive delivery was no problem to the same bunch that had struggled to use ‘all cows eat grass’ to remember the names of the spaces in the bass stave. The only thing I needed to do was connect their phone to a PA so the backing track could be played approaching dance club volume and to acquaint them with singing through a microphone. They took care of the dance routines and hand gestures themselves. Some of the groups had so much energy that the boys joined in spontaneously while other kids filmed it on their phones to send it to their friends and family when the class ended. If life’s a party, why couldn’t learning be a party as well?
 
Some of you might think that trying the ‘Personal Project’ with your 7s and 8s is too dangerous. I agree with you. You need to have an enormous array of skills: playing more than one instrument, vocal coaching, music technology and ICT wizardry and the soft skill of soothing a savaged ego when rival group members declare that they can no longer work with each other because of their ‘musical differences’. The good news is that in this musical playground everyone is a player.

 
Read the whole article here.
What is music to you?
This concise but profound report on the recent Music Without Borders community music leader training in Uganda highlights the power music has to lift people beyond their circumstances and into belonging, joy and self-expression.
Boost your music reading and theory skills
I recently received a communication from Brenda Braaten, a Canadian music theory teacher (and ukulele fan!) who has over 45 years’ teaching experience and is the author of many music theory books. She has launched online music theory teaching courses and the introductory level is free of charge.
In Brenda’s words: This is a totally on-line program that you can work on at home at any time of day. Video taped lessons are bite-sized, sequential, and thorough. 
If you’d like to know more, visit her site
I can’t find any back story about these two (code named ‘Kalalaika’), but they are accomplished musicians and friends who play beautifully together. There are some later videos (2016 being the most recent), but this version of Pachelbel’s Canon in D from 2014 is a lovely example of both their playing and their calm, happy faces!
Pachelbel Canon in D - Ukulele Duet
Rock on.
Danielle
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