Chad Johnson - Ukulele Aerobics: For All Levels, from Beginner to Advanced

Ukulele Aerobics is arranged in weekly practice units, with each day focusing on a different concept, to ensure that every facet of technique is given equal attention. Generally speaking, the material progresses in difficulty from easiest to hardest throughout the length of the book, though there may be a few slight digressions along the way due to some overlapping of various concepts and techniques. Heres an overview of the technical breakdown day-by-day:

Monday Chord Vocabulary: This is all about developing your chord vocabulary. Simply put, the more chords you know, the better equipped you are, and the more versatile youll be in any situation. The chords will start off extremely basic, but by the end, youll be learning altered dominants and more!

Tuesday Strumming: This day will concentrate on developing solid strumming skills and everything that goes along with that. The examples progress from basic and straightforward to highly syncopated and cover everything in between, including various muted strum effects and other specific technical challenges.

Wednesday Fingerstyle: Adding the fingerstyle technique to your bag of tricks will expand your horizons by leaps and bounds. The reentrant tuning makes some patterns especially interesting.

Thursday Scale Exercises: This day specifically concentrates on single-note playing. Both hands will receive a workout on this one.

Friday Legato: Though the ukulele does not have much sustain, the legato technique is still incredibly useful in both scalar and chordal playing. This day works on all aspects and is certain to build significant strength in your fretting hand.

Saturday Licks & Riffs: This is the fun day each week. You get to apply your newly acquired skills to a lick or riff in various styles throughout.

Sunday Miscellaneous: This day will often be pretty fun as well. Its geared toward studying techniques or concepts that dont neatly fit into the five categories covered Monday through Friday. Examples include tremolo, double stops, vibrato, and so forth.

Each example in this book is recorded on the accompanying audio at a moderate tempo. If its too fast for you at first, set your metronome at a tempo that you can handle and then gradually increase the speed until youre able to play along with the track flawlessly. But dont feel obligated to stop there; continue raising the tempo to challenge yourself.

Id suggest keeping notes on these examples as you progress through the book. If you find one thats particularly challenging, make a note of that. If you find one that you really enjoy, note that as well. You can make use of these as warm-ups every day if youd like or simply as material to play during any extra time you find outside your normally allotted practice time. Speaking of which, I recommend setting aside 20 or 30 minutes a day if possible to practice. If you have more time, by all means use it. But by getting 20 minutes in every day without fail, youre guaranteed to make steady progress. Leaving your uke in its case until Saturday and cramming all seven lessons in at once is not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination. I cannot stress enough the importance of daily practice!

The standard, or soprano, ukulele is tuned GCEA, with the string closest to your head being the G, and the one closest to your feet being the A. Unlike a guitar, however, the ukulele utilizes reentrant tuning, meaning the strings do not proceed from lowest to highest in pitch. Instead, the lowest pitch is the C, or 3rd string. The 2nd string, E, is a major 3rd above the C, and the 1st string, A, is a perfect 4th above the E. So what about the low G? The 4th string is actually tuned a perfect 5th higher than the 3rd string C. If this all seems a bit confusing, just match your ukes strings to the tuning pitches on the accompanying audio