Category: EDCI 306A
In the past when I have learned songs on the ukulele, I have always found memorizing the chords to be a lot more challenging than memorizing the lyrics. With lyrics, I find that memorizing them comes easily to me when I listen to the lyrics being sung many times. With chords however, I can’t memorize how to play the chords just by listening to a song on repeat. This means that memorizing chords will take a lot longer for me than lyrics.
Going into memorizing the chords, I began this process by practicing until I had the finger formations for all of the chords memorized. So for example, before learning this song, I would not be able to just play an A# because I had no idea which of my fingers would need to be on which strings and which frets. After practicing, I am now able to look at the chords that are in the song and automatically know where my fingers go.
My next step in memorization was memorizing the order of the chords as well as when to change chords. To accomplish this, I practiced section by section. I would not move on to the next section until I had the last one memorized. I also would start from the beginning again after getting a couple of the sections completely memorized. I found that memorizing the chords got easier as I went through the song because many of the chords repeat.
Going into learning “Unruly Heart”, one of the things I knew I would need to work on was the strum pattern. Once I found the key I wanted to play in, I practiced the chords and transitions between them without a strum pattern. I then experimented with different strum patterns that I already knew but none of them quite seemed to fit. That’s when I decided to look on YouTube for other people covering the song on the ukulele. I was able to find two ukulele covers of “Unruly Heart”, one of them did not really have a strum pattern since the singer just continuously strummed down, and the other cover (linked below) used a strum pattern that I had a hard time figuring out.
In the end, I decided to figure out a different strum pattern for my cover of the song. The strum pattern that I use is DDUUDU, I use this throughout most of the song except for at the beginning and the very end because I like the way it sounds when I start and end simply by strumming down on the chords.
I find that beginning to learn a song is always the most difficult part of the process. When I first started to learn “Unruly Heart”, I found myself trying some of the chords for the first time and immediately feeling discouraged since holding my fingers in the correct spots felt kind of uncomfortable. Immediately I started to think “oh no! I’ve committed to a song that’s too difficult so this is going to be way harder than I anticipated!” I was barely 10 minutes into learning the song and I was already stressing out. I tried a bit more and started to sing along with it but that’s when I realized that this key was also way too high for my singing range. I then noticed, at the bottom of my screen, the transpose button!
So I transposed the song into a lower key that I had an easier time singing with. I then tried to play the new chords and noticed I was having an even more difficult time with these chords than the last ones! So I decided to play around with the transpose button a bit more until I settled with a key that I had an easier time playing but it wasn’t quite the ideal key for me to sing in. The key that I’m playing in is a little high for me to sing in but I am going to ask my singing teacher if she can help me feel more comfortable with singing the higher parts if the song.
I am currently learning the song “Unruly Heart” from the musical The Prom on the ukulele. While practicing I found that I was having trouble making my transitions between chords smooth since I need to move my fingers to the next fret as well as up and down for many of my chord transitions. While I was playing, I noticed that my fingers were sticking to the strings a little bit which meant that, when I took my fingers off of the strings to change chords, the strings would make noise since they were being pulled with my fingers. I practiced my transitions a bit more, trying to figure out how to make my transitions sound smoother… when I got it! If I slid my fingers across the strings while changing chords, the strings wouldn’t be pulled and make extra sounds. Below is a video of me demonstrating how I slide my fingers between an A# and a D#, two chords that are repeated a lot in “Unruly Heart.”