Category Archives: Music

Uke!

Garret (of dangerousmeta! fame) links to a New York Times article about the comeback of the ukulele: Those four irresistible strings.

I’m actually a big fan of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain (I wish they’d do more concerts in Germany!). André gave me a ukulele for my birthday this year, so Ukulele Hunt (site mentioned in the NY Times article) comes in handy. And speaking of handy: When I got my ukulele, I found a little film on Youtube that shows how to tune it: Ukulele Tuning – Beginner Lesson.

I taught myself how to play chords on the guitar and got reasonably good at it when I was about sixteen, but I haven’t played in a long time. Now that I’ve got a ukulele I agree with Jim Beloff:

“If you were a poor guitar player,“ he said, “you suddenly become a pretty good uke player.“

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain

After posting about the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain a while ago, I happened upon them again today on MetaFilter. There are some great pieces of them on Youtube. My favourites: Fly me of the Händel, Wuthering Heights (Heathcliff!) and, of course, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It’s also worth checking out the video clips on their website to get an impression of the diversity of the songs they play.

Mit schönen Grüßen an den Schockwellenreiter und Craig!

How to play the piano

Ralf discovered Chuan C. Chang’s Fundamentals of Piano Practice. The book is also available at pianofundamentals.com. To quote the author:

“This web site provides free piano lessons, piano teaching material, and piano tuning instructions. You can learn piano up to 1000 times faster (!) compared to other methods (see Chapter One, IV.5). This is the first book ever written on how to practice at the piano. For hundreds of years, many teachers and other books taught you what techniques to acquire, but that is of little use unless you know how to acquire them quickly, as Mozart, Liszt, etc., did. You can download the entire book free using the links below.”

My last piano lesson was about 13 years ago… I’d really like to start playing again, but for now it’s not feasible to move my piano from my parents’ house to our current home. However, having a piano (or a similar instrument) at home is necessary in order to practise enough. I should really look into buying a used electric piano or something like that.

Music and Physics

Ralf links to a site just to my liking – I’ll have to take a closer look tomorrow, but it sounds like this could be useful for some lessons or projects at school.

Music Acoustics UNSW: “Physics and music have been closely related for thousands of years. The art and the science of music acoustics are presented on this site, in musician-friendly format, as is some of our research work in music science.”