September 16, 2024: Sakura Sakura (traditional from Japan) is posted in Book 2.
I am super excited to announce this piece of music and to tell you about some big changes initiated by this song.
First, you should play this song because it sounds amazing, it's from Japan, it's about going out to see all the cherry blossoms in bloom, and if you don't play it on ukulele in your neighborhood today, maybe nobody will, and that's a shame.
Second, it's been around for a few hundred years and it's got a haunting beautiful melody.
Third, and here's the main point, we're going to start getting a lot more complex with options and opportunities for all the songs posted here. In the past, I've given you a melody line for singing and for plucking. Then I've given you chords. That way you can play it in an ensemble, or sing it, or simply get smoother at melody playing. I also have always given you a TuffUke line so you could play a really nice solo arrangement of the piece either with your thumb, or with claw position.
- The good news: It works to get you up and going quickly.
- The bad news: You get really good and really lazy really fast.
So with this piece, I'm giving you a bigger view of how to attack a piece of music from beginning to end and bring a toolbox full of skills to a piece of music.
- You have the conductor score if you are teaching this stuff to other people. Yes, everybody at every level can play together, and isn't that the point of community music.
- You have a sheet with melody, lyrics and chords for newer ukulele players and for those of you in an ensemble situation wanting to keep it simple, or if you have a singer around you usually don't need to work quite so hard on the ukulele parts as the audience will be throwing cherry blossoms at your diva and you'll be in the back of the stage wondering why nobody care about how hard you worked.
- The TuffUke version will work with claw position or with our beloved thumb-down method and you'll sound great.
- If you're up for a challenge and needing to work on your claw picking, this version should really test you in lots of different ways.
Read the teaching notes to give you and idea what is important technique-wise and go make some music from thin air.
As always, let me know what's going well for you and what questions are plaguing you. Focus on good quality playing techniques and all the music will happily follow you.
