Where to Go Next If You Want More
Okay. Last lesson in this whole class, so let's talk about what happens after today.
You've got four chords clean. Two full songs. A strum pattern you can loop without thinking about it. You can read a chord chart, you know how to tune the thing, you know not to buy a fancy ukulele yet, and you've played for at least one other person without freezing up. That's the whole course. That's genuinely enough to keep going on your own for a long time.
So here's the actual question. What do you do starting next week, when there's no class to show up to?
Keep the daily five minutes
I said this a few lessons back and I'm not backing off it. Five minutes a day beats one long session on the weekend. If you stop coming to class and also stop picking up the uke regularly, you will lose ground fast. Calluses soften. Your fingers forget where G lives. It doesn't take long, maybe two weeks of nothing, and you're back to feeling around for the chord shape instead of just landing on it.
You don't need a new plan for this. Same five minutes. Tune first, non-negotiable, then run your chords, then play through "Sunshine" and "Riptide" a couple times each. That's it. That's the whole maintenance program.
Learn songs, not theory, for now
You don't need to go learn music theory next. You don't need to learn to read sheet music. I don't teach that in this class on purpose, because chord charts get you playing real songs fast, and most people who take up ukulele want to play songs, not analyze them. If somewhere down the road you get curious about why chords work the way they do, fine, go find that. But it's not the next step. The next step is more songs.
Go find chord charts for songs you actually like. Same searches you'd do for anything else. Most popular songs have a chord chart somewhere with the chord names written above the lyrics, same format we've been using. Look for one that uses chords you already know, or maybe one new chord, and work it the same way we worked "Riptide." Learn the new chord alone first. Add it into the loop slow. Don't strum fast until you can go slow clean. You know the sequence by now.
Where the actual gaps are, honestly
I'll tell you where I stop, because I don't want you thinking I'm the finish line.
I can't do fingerpicking beyond something very basic. If you want to learn intricate picking patterns, actual fingerstyle arrangements, that's a real skill and it's not one I have. There are people who teach that specifically and you should go find one of them if that's the itch.
Same with playing by ear. I need the chord chart in front of me. People who can just noodle around and find a song without one, by feel, genuinely puzzle me. If that's a thing you want to develop, it's a different kind of practice than what we've been doing here, and I can't walk you through it because I never built it myself.
That's fine. Nobody has to do everything. You can be a solid four-chord, chart-reading player for the rest of your life and it'll cover almost anything you'd ever want to play at a family thing or a fireside or just alone with the door shut.
Find someone to play badly with
Here's the thing that matters more than any of the technical stuff. My sibling Kenneth visited a while back and I taught him "Riptide" over one afternoon at the kitchen table. He is worse at it than I am. Genuinely worse, still fumbling the change into the last chord last I checked. And he had a better time playing it badly with me than I've had playing it well alone in my room a hundred times.
I thought about that for a while afterward. I'm not naturally a play-in-front-of-people person, you know that by now if you were here for that lesson. But there's something that happens when you hand the uke to someone else, or sit next to them while they're learning the same three chords you already know, that doesn't happen practicing alone. It's not about being good together. It's about being bad together, a little, and not minding.
So find your Kenneth. A kid, a spouse, a neighbor, the person at the ward game night who asked you to bring the uke and you should probably say yes this time. Teach them the two chords from week one. Let it be clumsy. That's the actual next step, more than any new chord chart.
Before next time
There isn't a next time in this class, so instead: pick one song you actually want to learn, find the chord chart, and play through it slow before this weekend's over. Don't wait for motivation. Just tune up and start.