New To The Ukulele?

The Phoenix Ukulele Group doesn’t actually teach, but our friend Kehau does. If you would like lessons, please reach out to her.

click to go to her Facebook page

The ukulele is an easy instrument to learn. Here is some stuff you should know as an introduction to the ukulele.

A soprano ukulele

There are 5 types of Ukuleles:

Soprano
Concert
Tenor
Baritone
uBass

The first three are usually tuned GCEA, where the top string (assuming it’s held right-handed) is tuned to G. Occasionally, the G string will be swapped out with a thicker string and tuned to a low G. The technical names are re-entrant tuning and linear tuning. The non-technical names are “normal” tuning and “oh, that’s a deeper sound” tuning.

The baritone is like playing a guitar without it’s thickest strings, and the chords below don’t apply to it. There are several members of the ukulele group that can probably speak to playing the baritone ukulele.

I don’t know much at all about the uBass other than it’s a bass ukulele and when paired with an amp, it sounds really awesome.

Figure 1 below shows the most common chords. The number on each dot represents a finger on your hand. 1 being your pointer, 2 being your middle finger, and 3 being your ring finger. Sometimes you will have to use your pinky. The picture for the A chord below has the numbers wrong but the dots are right.

Figure 1

Figure 2 shows what I like to call, super common chords!

Figure 2

A super huge chord chart that I like to use sometimes is here

There are literally hundreds of songs (if not thousands) you can play with just knowing these chords.

Some of the songs in the video can be found within our library.

Coming to our meetups is a great way to learn songs and strumming patterns; and for those with better voices than mine (which is literally everybody), to learn to sing while playing!

Sam Ash has Ukuleles for anyone to try out and we are a helpful bunch. If you want to get an ukulele online for yourself or as a gift for someone, below is what I suggest.