Santa’s budget might have been a bit tight around your house this year. So, of course, that certainly explains why you didn’t find the William King tenor or a 3K Martin under your tree come Christmas morning.
But if you’ve been good (and if you’re an ukulele player, I’m just gonna guess that you’re “good” in some form or another), you might have some Christmas cash that someone slipped your way and told you to buy yourself “something you’d like.”
Now’s the time to do the buying. Thanks to Jim and Liz Beloff, I have just the suggestion for you to start the new year with ukulele joy: run to your nearest computer, log on to Flea Market Music and buy yourself a copy of The Daily Ukulele: 365 Songs for Better Living.
Yes, it’s $34.99. And, yes, all of you penny-pinchers, you can find a lot of ukulele songs on the Internet for FREE. And, yes, some clubs (notably the folks in Santa Cruz) have some wonderful “collections” of fun-to-play ukulele songs for a small fraction of the $34.99.
But there’s simply no comparison with Daily Ukulele. Not only is it the creative offspring of Beloff, who reigns as ukedom’s own pater-familias, but if you had to limit your music shelf to just one item, you can consider it “the only songbook” an ukulele player really needs.
Believe me, I don’t say that easily. As someone with a passion for Hawaiian-style playing, I typically don’t like “all in one” songbooks because they rarely have any island songs, or they have just a few. This collection though has a great selection of Hawaiian—as well as songs from every other genre (a complete listing of songs is on the website above).
But here’s what really makes The Daily Ukulele stand apart—in addition to just showing chord names and shapes, the songs are all presented in standard musical notation. Whoa—I understand many of us like the ukulele precisely because we don’t want to learn to “read music,” so I won’t make you tackle the treble clef (there are only a few songs which sport below-middle-C notes in this very-friendly-to-“high-G”-tuned-instruments book)—just be happy that it’s there.
Yet I find it really valuable to have melodies for each song in standard notation because you can play melody if you want to, either now or some day when you do want to attempt the whole “Every Good Boy Does Fine” mnenomic for the lines on the treble clef staff. Also shown for each song is the first note to sing and play (in graphic tablature format so you don’t need to read music for that, either).
This songbook is one that I think every ukulele “group” should strongly recommend for its members (did you hear that, you members of Ukuleles of Paradise?). The wide range of songs, the large size of the type (good for those late-night strumming sessions) and the info-packed introduction with the “basics” of playing ukulele make this songbook a “must have.” I’ll venture to say that any group that’s just starting out simply needs to make sure everyone has a copy of The Daily Ukulele and the club and its members will be off to a guaranteed great start.
Unfortunately, there is a bad side to this book —in addition to a great loss of time in your life on the day the UPS guy delivers it to you and you have to try “just a few songs” and that turns into 87 minutes…
In my opinion, the binding on this book portends trouble. While it is nice in that it lays very flat, it’s that type of plastic comb binding that presents a smooth outer binding but is created with little plastic tabs which hold the pages. I hate that kind of binding. The pages inevitably (starting with the cover) slip over the tabs; first just a few holes and pages at a time. Eventually, though, you have a full-scale revolution on your hands, despite your efforts to carefully re-home the pages back into the little plastic tabs. Yuck.
The first printing of the He Mele Aloha songbook had the same plastic comb binding. I remember many kanikapila sessions where several of us had that book and, on turning to another song, you’d almost always hear someone curse as a page or two relieved itself of its binding right there on their music stand. It was enough to make playing Hawaiian music unpleasant; well, almost…
I solved that by taking my He Mele Aloha book to a local print shop that does metal spiral binding. They carefully took my whole songbook apart, cut off the inner half-inch of the pages and then reassembled the book, this time binding it with the metal spiral. Yes, it does remove a bit of the page and the printing is now closer to the inside binding, but it’s still very usable—and sturdy.
I have the same surgery slated this week for my copy of The Daily Ukulele.
And that will make this book perfect!