Why take a music course me if you can grab what you need from YouTube video tutorials and jam sessions? My students tell me that they benefit from interacting with others in a small focussed group and practice my exercises and arrangements.
Classes in Zoom are great for technique building. Plus, you can review the video recordings and play along until the next class. I develop original curriculum to cater to individual needs. My fourth ukulele book will likely be the exercises I made for Ukulele Bootcamp. What is it? Read on.
Birth of Ukulele Bootcamp
In March 2020, my new “Ukulele Bootcamp” in Cambridge, Massachusetts got cancelled because of worldwide pandemic lockdowns. I had planned to spend a day jumpstarting all you need to play the ukulele with what I learned from teaching myself. The pandemic pushed me to learn how to navigate in Zoom very quickly and offer all my music classes online.
I converted the 9 to 5 all-day in-person workshop into 8 weeks of one hour sessions in Zoom. It was the solution for those under lockdown, wanting to learn what they needed to know to play songs they wanted to play — immediately. That’s the 80/20 or 20/80 rule.
Ukulele Bootcamp has become my flagship ukulele course, promising the “20% you need to play the 80% of what you want.” You can take it as many times as you want because it’s different each time I teach it, as with most of my courses.
The 80/20 Rule
The Italian polymath Vilfredo Pareto observed that about 80% of Italy’s land was owned by 20% of the population. The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of the effects are due to 20% of causes (the “vital few”). Other names for this principle are the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few or the principle of factor sparsity.
Applied to music, I sense that 80% of all songs we play use only 20% of all the chords that exist. Similarly, we can accompany 80% of all songs with 20% of all strum patterns, fingerpicking patterns, and other ways to weave together harmony and rhythm.
I’ve seen it in house renovations. You construct or demolish 80% of the house in the first 20% of the time. The remaining 80% is spent on the 20% that require special tools and attention. I use this rule to learn new skills and new instruments.
Can you identify the 20% you need?
Teach Yourself the Ukulele
To answer the first question in this blog post, I say, “Yes, you CAN teach yourself to play the ukulele.” I wrote an essay for my MA in Music degree about the sources you can find online to teach yourself to play the ukulele.
Sure, you can save a lot of money teaching yourself, but are you saving time or spending unnecessary amount of time? Are you aware of your blind spots? Are you aware of what you may be doing wrong? Or the short cuts or correct procedures that will take you there faster?
Here’s my story. When I was a teenager on Okinawa, I taught myself to play the organ after a brief meeting with the departing chief organist. I played five different church services each week and all the weddings, memorial, and funeral services that arose.
In the ensuing decades I did not touch the organ except to play for one wedding in England. Last October, I took up a position as church organist and noticed my limitations. In my first organ lesson from a music professor, I learned what I was doing wrong and a lot of things I simply didn’t and couldn’t know, unless I was taught. Changing bad habits required a lot of will and practice.
Taking lessons or taking a class will get you where you need to go more quickly and more accurately. You are less likely to develop bad habits or have to unlearn the wrong ways to play.
Benefits of Bootcamp
Ukulele Bootcamp is great for
- beginners to firm their knowledge and boost their playing skills to a new level
- motivate and refresh those who stopped playing but want to return
- help the self-taught to confirm or correct what they know
- interact with others
- BONUS in FALL 2023 — get individual attention in the study break session through the breakout room with me
Ukulele Bootcamp FALL 2023
What’s new and different from previous offerings is that during the “study break” I will be giving private individual lessons in the breakout room while everyone else is in Zoom or breakout rooms with each other. I will also introduce tab reading and fingerpicking technique so we can spice up our strumming with riffs. REGISTER via the Google Form.
This 8-week course starts on Halloween eve 31st October at 7:30 PM EDT
8 Tuesdays
23:30 GMT (UK time)
7:30 PM EDT (East Coast USA)
4:30 PM PDT (West Coast USA)
1:30 PM HST (Hawai’i)