Ukulele From The Beginning Uke

This is a nice little starter book that feeds you chords slowly and gives you a much smoother learning curve than just jumping in and trying to play something you heard on the radio. People will say that the folk tunes are "for kids" but for an adult wanting to develop their ear for chords using simple music they already know, it's also a good thing. Don't expect it to teach you the theory behind why those chords were chosen though! I expect this book would work particularly well in a "class lesson" setup where the teacher knows what they are doing, and it does have a few pitfalls for those self-teaching:If you don't read music, the book gives you no further help to get the starting note of the tunes. Either learn to read music and how to pluck out a melody on the uke, or start strumming and hope you can guess the key well enough to start singing. If this book has a CD option, it might help to get that. I've seen other books give you a chord box showing the starting note and that would help a lot here.This book is very much geared to strumming the ukelele to accompany singing, but the pitch of the arrangements is not always voice-friendly. For example "ten green bottles" asks for the singer to sing a G3 which is lower than a child should be asked to sing, and "she'll be coming round the mountain" wants a G5 which is higher than many adult women are happy with.

As a complete novice to any instrument, apart from the recorder in junior school, I thought it best to start from the very beginning. Although this book is aimed fairly and squarely and primary school age students, it's also perfect for middle aged beginners like me. If you are coming to the ukulele from another instrument, especially another stringed instrument, then you will likely very quickly become bored with the books simplicity. But. For a complete musical novice like me, it's perfect.Most of the songs are, as is to be expected given it's target audience, childrens songs. One or two of them I've never heard of, one or two more I used to sing as a kid on long car journeys.In summary. If you are coming to the ukulele from another instrument, then you probably need something a little more in depth. If, like me, you are coming from a background of paper and comb, or kazoo, then this is the starter book.

The title of the listing refers to a CD and the picture of the cover says CD edition. No CD provided. Other than that seems like a reasonable starter book.

well it helps if you do have a bit of musical knowledge since whilst it does show the cords in box form it does jump straight into real music notation almost immediately with the name of each cord above the appropriate bit of music but cord box diagrams as reminders what each name means would help too for a musical thicky like me. however that's perhaps more a reflection on my musical ability than a refection about the book and I am sure learners will find it useful

Good book to get started with the Ukelele, got some classic songs in it and is very easy to follow. My 6 year old likes doing the first song, but finds even the second chord a bit difficult to do currently, so I can't give it 5 stars just from our experience, but is fine for me!

Nice intro to playing the ukulele for children. Any adult beginners might find the choice of tunes rather too focussed towards children. It would have been nice to see a few more 'modern' songs that would appeal to adults, which would have made it ideal for all ages.

This was to help me learn the uke and it's OK

i bought this for my grandson who was learning to play. It is easy to read and teaches the first few chords and strumming. I can't comment on how good it is in practice as haven't seen my grandson since I gave it to him.