Ukulele Tonya

When you head to a jam session, is your collection of “must-have” music sheets heavier than your ukulele?

That’s what it’s like for me. Wait—let’s change that: That’s what it was like for me before I spent some serious time with Jim D’Ville’s DVD, “Play Ukulele by Ear (click the link here for buying details).”

Jim, a gifted teacher and an ukulele player with some seriously awesome chops, created this DVD based on his popular workshops around the Portland and Pacific Northwest. Jim is also the co-author of the book/CD combo: “The Natural Way to Music.”

“Stop learning songs the old-fashioned way, one at a time,” reads the promo for the DVD. “Let Jim DVille teach you all the songs in advance by training your ears to tune by ear, hear chords, chord progressions, musical intervals and melodies.”

Uh oh; it sounds suspiciously like it’s dancing cheek to cheek with (close your eyes, it’s that ever-dreaded trepidation-filled topic of many ukulele players)—music theory.

You can open your peepers now. It’s not so scary—not the way Jim approaches it at least. In this DVD lesson package, he introduces you very gently to music theory, and he achieves it without sheets of paper scored with music notation and all those arcane sounding musical terms (well, except for a brief mention of C6 and why it is what it is—but then he drops that subject really quickly when he notices that eyes are glazing over). (Read on …)

Although it has a European pedigree, the ukulele has been adopted wholeheartedly by Hawaiians—so any trip to this island paradise wouldn’t be complete without plenty of ukulele-centric activities—at least that’s how I look at it!

Ukulele experiences abounded during our November 2008 trip to the island that’s most appropriately called “The Big Island.” While it’s certainly been a few months since that visit, I’m offering my account here because you can always enjoy ukuleles and a trip to Hawaii. Just consider me your Big Island Ukulele Tour Guide—and read on for the four-string details! (If you want to read about this trip’s Oahu segment, which preceded our visit here, scroll down for “Three (Ukulele) Days in Waikiki.”)

Landing at the Kona-side airport on the Big Island can be a bit off-putting if you’ve not traveled previously to the island. Passengers from Oahu first see the outlines of Lana’i and Moloka’i and the edge of Maui before heading “down” to this southernmost of the Hawaiian islands. Flying in, the sea is a blanket of inky blueness where it’s the deepest. Approaching the coast of the island, though, the color facets itself into a shimmer of blues, from the peacock-turquoise of the sandy-bottomed areas just offshore to the stands of dark coral seen underwater through an azure wash of color.

(Read on …)