Author Archives: tiltherewasuke

It is a common misconcepion that the ukulele came from Hawaii. Although eventually manufactured and popularised there, the ukulele actually originates from Portugal….

For further reading on the history of the ukulele click here:

http://www.ukuleleguild.org/history.php

In other news, today our brand new choir ‘Come Together’ made their debut performance! Brain child of Stacey, our fabulous group of local pro singers and musicians sang their way through four festive songs at the Dorchester Christmas Cracker. The arrangements, done by Stacey and I, were full of lush harmonies and our singers truly did them justice. There was a great crowd and we had some lovely feedback! After a mulled wine and a hog roast roll – Christmas has really begun!

If you’d like to catch our choir at it’s only other Christmas performance, we are singing at the Lodmoor pub on Thursday 13th! xx

So perhaps we got you excited about the idea of taking up the ukulele? But have you ever considered a Banjolele?! Don’t know what a Banjolele is? Check out this video, I’m playing a vintage Banjolele which is over 100 years old! We love the sound it, even if it has a tendency to get a tad out of tune… We hope you enjoy!

As promised, your first Christmas lyric and chord sheet…

JINGLE BELLS

C

Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle all the way,

F                       C                     G

Oh what fun it is to ride in a one horse open sleigh, hey!

C

Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle all the way,

F                       C                     G                         C

Oh what fun it is to ride in a one horse open sleigh!

Remember to follow the tips I gave you on day two and enjoy yourself! This is best practiced with a glass of Baileys and a mince pie to hand xx

“I’ve got a ukulele!” Is one of the things that people come up to me and say the most when when we’re gigging. It is usually followed by “I can’t play it though!” To which I reply, that’s a real shame because with a few basic tips- anyone can get a huge amount of enjoyment and satisfaction out of a playing a ukulele. Here are a few important things I tell my beginners….

• Remember to tune your ukulele before practicing, you will get very little pleasure trying to strum a tune out of an untuned ukulele. The four open strings are: G, C, E, A. You can tune to a piano or find an online electronic tuner.
• The first three most important chords to learn are C, F and G. You can learn hundreds of simple songs with these three chords alone. There are many great ukulele tuition books and websites out there, find one that suits you and follow the chord boxes and shapes to learn your chords.
• Each finger on your hand has a number 1, 2, 3, 4. To help make the chord shapes easier to play, you need to make sure you put the correctly numbered finger on the right string. Again, any good instruction book will tell you how to do this.
• Each song you learn will have it’s own rhythm and strumming pattern. It is advisable to keep it simple to start with so you can stay in time. Perhaps try doing one downward strum per beat?
• If you are following a lyric and chord sheet, the chord to play is written above the words as a capital letter – you must remember to change chord shape when the letter changes!
• Finally, have fun with it. No one ever learned the ukulele wearing a frown 🙂

Tomorrow’s advent surprise may contain a festive song chord sheet for you try out your C, F and G chords…

xx

So the 1st December is here and behind your first door is a little audio treat!
This beautiful song inspired our name so we hope you take 2 minutes out of your day to listen to this schmoozey song….xx

A slightly premature heading perhaps…. but not in the TTWU house! We spent last night arrnaging and planning a whole host of festive ukulele covers and it really got us in the mood. After having such a great few weeks, gaining lots of interest and new followers from our wedding fair and newly posted videos we have a number of Christmassy gigs and events lined up in December- including a Wedding, a mini tour of some of our local care homes and a festive re-appearence on AIR radio.

Even Father Christmas Loves a bit of Ukulele…

We are also planning our very own special TTWU advent count down to Christmas Day, you can follow it here on the blog or on our facebook page. Join us from the 1st of December and make your count down a bit different with some TTWU Yuletide Yul-kulele magic!

xxx

This weekends Vintage fun inspired us to get some new recordings done and so we got ourselves glammed up and recorded 13 new songs!!

Here’s one of our faves to wet your appetite…

Please visit http://www.youtube.com/TTWUKE for more of the same 🙂

We hope you enjoy watching as much as we enjoyed making xx

Well, our day exceeded expectations. It began with a beautiful drive from Esher to Chiswick through Kingston, past Hampton Court Palace and via Richmond. It was a blue skied, crisp, frosty, picture perfect autumnal morning and really set us up for the beautiful day ahead!!
The Vintage Wedding Fair was super and we were lucky enough to meet lots of lovely couples, fellow fantastically creative exhibitors and blushing brides to be!
We put a lot of thought and effort into our table display and were very happy with the result, it showed our recent adventures and wedding performance packages off to their best…

We performed a few numbers from our set every half hour or so and it was lovely to see the reaction of the room! People really seemed to appreciate our unique style and original sound.
We had a fabulous day and are super excited to have been booked to provide entertainment for a number of couples of their special day!!

What a lovely job we have and thank you to all the veteran exhibitors and Keeley the organiser for making us feel so welcome 🙂

Keep your eyes peeled for new videos being uploaded tomorrow!!

Signing off from a very happy pair 🙂
Stacey & Lucy x