Music 074: Intro to Ukulele

As I mentioned, if you choose to allocate time for taking classes aboard a cruise, you don't have to worry about tests, which is just as well, because I doubt I would do that well in filling in the blanks about specific species or scientist names, though I think I could probably get close to 100% on multiple choice or true/false questions.

In any case, I'll never know.  On a cruise, we attend lectures simply for the enjoyment of stretching our minds rather than for some pinpointed future employment.  There's no need to prove ourselves to have better retained the information than classmates, most of whom we'll never see again.

I guess in a way that makes us like Steve Jobs, who dropped into classes like Calligraphy that grabbed his interest despite having presumably little practical application for a career.

Will it lead us to creative breakthroughs of our own, like the beautiful font options we now take for granted on our word processing programs?

Probably not.

For better or worse, most of us will never come close to being Steve Jobs.

However, I have no problem allowing my mind to wander like Jobs, which in this case has taken me far away from my original topic with no apparent bridge back.

Let's see, classes without tests, naming scientists and species...oh, that's right, teachers.

Beginning in junior high school, we began to have specialized teachers for each subject, rather than one teacher per school year.  (As an aside, can you remember the name of every grade school teacher  you had?  I know I can.  And yet, I struggle with character names from a TV show I watched last year.)

When given the choice among different teachers, you may have had a favorite for every semester, though I remember personally considering this more in college, where the teachers were forced to some extent to compete for students.

I mean, we could sign up for any classes we wanted, and drop the ones that turned out to be boring, though I must admit I dropped classes primarily when they were inconvenient to my social calendar, which is NOT the proper approach to college, for anyone taking notes.

The same is true on a cruise.

There's so much going on at any given time, you frequently must choose between activities.

So, if I make it a point to attend a particular speaker's presentations every day, then that generally means they're particularly great.

On our Star Princess cruise, I attended every "class" with two teachers all the way through: naturalist Mark Harris and musician Tiki Dave.

Early in a Princess Hawaii cruise, passengers are invited to join an introductory ukulele class.  You would think 78 loaner ukuleles would be plenty to accommodate vacationers willing to take time away from long lunches, poolside books, ocean gazing, yoga, trivia games and a third dessert at half past noon each day (while class officially started at 12:45, we were conditioned to arrive early to pick up ukes and find seats), but in fact a wait list began the first day.  People without ukes continued coming until they earned the right to strum like Bruddah Iz.

I figured a ukulele must be like the bottom four strings of the guitar, which I already knew how to play.  Truthfully, didn't you sometimes choose a class because you were confident you could ace it based on what you already knew?

To my surprise, the top string is tuned higher relative to the other strings than on a guitar, and even worse, what would be a G chord on guitar is a C chord on ukulele.  When I read the chord, muscle memory wanted to take my fingers to the wrong position, but overall it was similar.  I didn't turn out to be the Jimi Hendrix of the ukulele.

The first day of class I arrived early enough to get a rosewood ukulele with decent "action" on the fret board (the strings pushed down easily), but the second day Tiki Dave gave me a beat-up old souvenir shop ukulele with gold turtles painted on the front.  Right away, I could tell that my left hand cramped to push down the strings was not producing consistently clean notes, and it would go out of tune on every song, but I figured I would get another one next time.

Wrong.

We kept that ukulele for the rest of the lessons, and I was too stubborn to trade it in for a better one when more dedicated students turned in their loaners after buying their own ukuleles in Hawaii at the shops recommended by Tiki Dave. 

Regardless, I learned the fundamentals of the ukulele, though I must confess that I didn't practice enough.  I didn't want to disturb the neighbors, much less Julie.  And quite frankly, I had that same lazy approach to practicing my guitar lessons when I was ten years old, although the rationalizations were different.

As the cruise approached conclusion, we were asked to return at 2 PM to perform in the atrium, and then to go to a practice and performance in the Princess Theater on the final sea day, where we were part of the Aloha 'Oe show along with fellow passengers who learned the hula from Tiki Dave's wife Leialoha.

It was tempting to drop out, just as I dropped out of many extra curricular activities throughout my school years, but I decided to stick with it for a change, and I'm glad I did, even if I played a lot of bad notes that were covered by the many others strumming correctly.

For the big show, I shared the sheet music stand with a couple of nice Brits, Chris and Jim, who turned out to be very much like me and my high school friends, except coming from Manchester and Liverpool, respectively, they spoke more like Paul McCartney.  Jim said he was a member of a Ukulele Club in Liverpool that was a lot of fun.  It made me wish I had taken more time to make friends in class, but isn't that the way it always is at the end of a school year?

Reminder to self: always take time to make new friends.

Tiki Dave, who was consistently engaging and kind as he taught, had promised at least one standing ovation, and with his comical urging, he delivered several from the rather large audience for those of us who in our small way paid respect to the Hawaiian culture.