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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.
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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!
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