
Take a look at the video and chord tabs here. STEP 1: Find Out and Write Out the Chordsįirst, I looked up the chords for “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and made some chord charts for myself to look at while I was learning. Here’s how you can use muscle memory exercises while learning to play “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in 3 steps. But because of the particular chords used, and the slow speed, it’s a very beginner-friendly song. Now, this song has 5 chords, which seems like a lot. We can use the same idea to learn “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on the uke. They need to speed up very gradually, a little every few weeks, to get as good at it as we are. Think about it this way: little kids look pretty clumsy brushing their teeth slowly and carefully (and getting toothpaste everywhere anyway). You need to increase your speed gradually, building muscle memory from slow to fast.

That’s almost true – but people get tripped up because they try to move too quickly at first, and that ends up slowing them way down. The difference is that a lot of people think building muscle memory is just doing something over and over again until you get it right. It’s a little different from what most people usually try to do.

To prove it, I’ll show you my system for getting ukulele chords into muscle memory. Changing chords smoothly to play a song on the uke is actually making the same kind of demands on your brain.
UKELELE TABS TEN THUMBS PASSWORD
The same thing happens when you unlock that gym lock or brush your teeth in the morning.Īnd, exactly the same thing happens when the words in a song “tell” you which chords to play – if you follow my system for changing chords easily.Īs far as your brain is concerned, playing the uke is no different from quickly typing a computer password or brushing your teeth: it’s all about harnessing the power of muscle memory. It’s exactly the same thing that happens when a password you want to type on a computer keyboard “tells” you where to put your fingers. In other words, Rubik’s cubers aren’t really solving the cube every time – they’re just moving parts of the cube around based on simple pieces of information that “tell” them which motions to do when.
UKELELE TABS TEN THUMBS SERIES
It turns out that it doesn’t take much talent to be a fast Rubik’s cuber: you just have to be able to recognize very simple patterns in the positions of the colours on the cube and perform – using something called muscle memory – a series of repetitive motions to move the squares around. But they do! And what’s more, if you can do those things, you could also be a competitive Rubik’s cube-solver. “Those things have nothing to do with each other,” you might be thinking.
UKELELE TABS TEN THUMBS HOW TO
We’ll go over how to do that using the song “ Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as an example. If the answer is yes, you can learn how to move between chords just as easy.

Have you ever momentarily forgotten the combination on your gym lock and had to slow down – a lot – to get the numbers right? Or automatically brushed your teeth in the morning while thinking about what you had to do that day? This week we have a guest post from Eduardo at, over to you Eduardo…
