Stand By Me: Learning Project Week 2

Welcome to my week 2 ukulele learning project update!

My ukulele project has gone fairly well this week. First, an update on my ukulele skills:

My goal was to use YouTube videos to work on my strumming technique and to focus on the song Stand By Me. Luckily, I found the YouTube channel Cynthia Lin Music when searching for easy strumming tutorials, and discovered that she also had a video about the chords for Stand By Me.

Using the above strumming video on her channel, I learned how to strum with my index finger instead of my thumb, and to be more consistent with sounding each individual string when strumming. I think this technique has helped reduce some of the sound issues with my string that refuses to stay in tune. After practicing with the video, then using the tips Cynthia Lin talks about, I was able to improve my strumming technique and confidence overall.

From there, I watched her Stand By Me video. I learned the island strum pattern (down, down, up, up, down, up), which is used in many songs and also learned a new chord (Am). Using the strumming pattern, the new chord, and used the three chords I had previously learned (C, F, G7), I was able to learn the pattern for this song.

After a few days of practice, I got fairly comfortable with the strumming pattern and chord transitions for Stand By Me, which is what is shown in my video at the start of the blog. The speed is obviously much faster than I would go if I were singing along. However, I tried singing and immediately got confused with my strumming pattern! So I decided to become really comfortable and familiar with the strumming pattern first and to try to make changing chords more of an automatic thing by practicing quicker. I think a new goal of mine is to be able to sing along to something while I play.

I think focusing on the strumming pattern helped me get pretty comfortable with it. I do still need to work on my consistency - the clip below is from my first video attempt for your viewing pleasure!

Going forward, I want to work up to whole hand strumming like Cynthia Lin demonstrated in her strumming video. I also want to learn some other strumming patterns. But first, I am going to focus on learning a few more chords and maybe even learning a scale. So, my goals for this next week are to focus on learning more chords and scales and to try out TikTok as a source for online learning.