Category: Midterm

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.”