I have finally began working on STEP 7 of my Learning Plan. This step is about choosing the song picked from STEP 6 and to learn how to play it. Simple enough? WRONG! The first step I did after choosing the song was to look up what chords I had to play. I went back to the UKETABS.com website that I have used before, directly to the page with chords for Cigarette Daydreams by Cage the Elephant. I instantly found the chords and I was quite pleased. They all seemed to be easy and within my capabilities. The basic chords I need to know are A, Bm, D, Dmaj7, Em, and G. I had never heard of the chord Dmaj7, but as I was researching more with people who have played this song there was a recommendation to use Dm instead. I found this to be mush easier for me, while still sounding the same. (But lets be honest, everything is still sounding the same to me) I began practising these chords. The one thing I absolutely love about this site is that as you scroll down on the page, these chords stay prominent at the top. This really comes in handy when you are progressing on the song but forget where your fingers go and which chord is which. SO this looks great, right? I should be able to play the song..... WRONG again. I need to know the strumming pattern. Here is where my biggest challenge came into play. I looked through google, but no where I could find specific strumming patterns. I was told by friends and what I read online when you don't know the pattern, to just strum how you feel and works with the music. I found that this was not a good option for me. I am still feeling unsure with my ukulele skills and having trouble hearing the tune, so I needed more. Next I turned to YouTube. YouTube has everything, right? RIGHT. Thankfully I turned back to the good ol Ukulele Teacher and he had a tutorial of this song on his page. After giving this video an alarming amount of views I began the attempt to play the song. I discovered that I needed to do a pattern of about 8 strums. Basically I needed to do seven strums down and one strum up. Well now I'm nervous. Practising moving to each chord was hard enough, but now I have to strum... and quickly. Oh no. There's definitely not enough time in the class for this to work out, but I'm going to try anyways. Here I am very slowly practising finding each chords and only few strums. This is my process of trying to learn the chords. REPETITION. So much repetition.
Stay tuned for next week where I *hopefully* can move a little faster and make the song sound some what recognizable. Don't forget to follow #ukecandoit for my #learningproject related twitter posts
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