Welcome back to my blog! As the last few weeks of school are approaching, I have been working on my third song “Mamma Mia”. Overall, the song is coming along quite well, however, I am still struggling with the chord transitions from “A” to “Bm”. I was originally planning to record this song as a duet with Alexa but with the recent Covid-19 pandemic, both of us will be travelling back home for the rest of the semester. I know we were looking forward to playing together and perhaps in the future, we will have the opportunity to do so. In the meantime, I have been increasing the current tempo in order to match it closer to the original song. This song has a simple “D, U, D, U, D, U” strumming pattern which has been the easiest pattern of all the songs I have learned this semester. For the rest of the semester, my goal is to be able to sing and play at the same time. 

Attached is the video that I have been using to learn the Bm chord.

For the rest of the semester, I have decided to learn one more song which is a famous Hawaiian ukulele cover. It is called “Over the Rainbow/Wonderful World” originally performed by IsraĂ«l Kamakawiwo’ole. I came across this song a few years ago and thought it was such a beautiful combination of two classic songs. The chords in the song are the following: “Am, C, D, D7, Em, E7, F, G”. The strumming pattern is “D, D, U, U, D, U” and it is referred to as the “island strum”. This is the same strumming pattern that I learned while playing “Somone to Lava”, and most of the notes in this song I have learned through the other songs. I am continuing to work on adding more speed to this song, and hopefully next week I can start singing and playing at the same time!

Here is the official video of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow/Wonderful World” played by IsraĂ«l Kamakawiwo’ole.

– Ms. G 🙂