DVD Review: Play Ukulele by Ear, by Jim D’Ville
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 …)