Mastering The Ukulele

One day, while I was in Hawaii on vacation in 2014, I bought some cheap $13 ukulele, just to have… I thought it was cute, but honestly I didn’t consider it much more than a toy. But for some reason I was drawn to wanting to do more with it.

I had a chance to play an ukulele at the Polynesian Cultural Center. I was like, “Heck ya! I can play this thing!”, it really got me excited about it.

The following year, Jaime and I were on vacation again in Oahu and we ran out of things to do, so she pulled up some local news and saw that a couple of blocks away was an Ukulele festival. We went and could barely see the stage. We sat and just enjoyed each other’s company and then this dude started playing. He was amazing! In between some songs he talked about how he couldn’t sing so he just played what was called fingerstyle ukulele.

When we got home, I looked up who that one person was. It was none other than Jake Shimabukuro, who was some Rockstar ukulele guy. I really dug what he was doing and it got me to start playing more and more seriously. I joined a group on Meetup.com that met at a Sam Ash near my house. (I now own the PhoenixUkuleleGroup.com domain and run their website)

After a couple of years of playing, Jake came to town to play in Mesa. Also a couple more times too. These are from 2018, 2019, and 2023.

For New Years of 2018. I decided to do 100 day challenges for myself on mastering songs on the ukulele. Some days I would practice for hours and throughout the challenges it felt good to get down to practice down to just a few minutes.

Below are the 100 day completion videos.

April 12, 2018: Bohemian Rhapsody