Ukulele & Languages

Different countries,
Different cultures
one common language... the ukulele.

Ukulele & Languages Posts

03 2011

Visit a ukulele shop in Beijing, China

If you are a faithful reader of this blog, you might have been wondering why I haven’t posted in a while.  Be reassured, I haven’t dropped the ukulele nor decided to stop blogging. The reason for my silence has been a one-week business trip to Beijing, China.

Thanks to my friend Al from Uke Hunt, I have been able to add a ukulele aspect to my trip and to meet really lovely ukulele players from the Philippines and from China.

After a 10-hour flight during which I couldn’t sleep a wink, I arrived in Beijing on Saturday morning at 7:00 am local time, my Fluke carefully packed in my rucksack, ready to start the day despite the lack of sleep.

At 2:00 pm I met Connie, a ukulele player from the Philippines living an hour and a half away from Beijing and who had the extreme kindness to travel the distance to Beijing, meet me and introduce me to a ukulele shop owner in the North West of Beijing.

Let me invite you to a virtual visit of this ukulele shop in Beijing and to meet the lovely people I have met there. The shop is called The Modern Musical Instrument Company and is owned by Liang Xin Ming. Liang Xin Ming, who also teaches how to play ukulele, was not there when I visited but I met his wife Zong.

In case you ever travel to Beijing and wish to visit this ukulele shop, here is their card. If you don’t speak Chinese, you can use the card to give instructions to a taxi driver.

The music shop is divided in two halves, one part dedicated to Chinese instruments and the other half to the ukulele (and to a few guitars).

There is nothing like being made so welcome by the nicest ukulele player around, like the sight of many ukes and the pleasure of holding your own to bring a smile on one’s face…

A closer look at the ukuleles on display. Notice the concert uke with the Chinese mask painting.

Time to look inside the shop…

Apart from a couple of Kala and Ohana ukes, most of the ukulele brands on display were unfamiliar to me. Most of the ukes were mounted with GHS strings (not my favourite strings) and a few with Aquilas.

And now meet Zong (left), the lovely wife of the shop owner who made us feel at home in the shop and played along with us, and Connie (right), to whom I will never be thankful enough for her kindness and for that memorable ukulele afternoon in Beijing.

The Ukulele & Languages motto ‘Different countries, different cultures, one common language… the ukulele’ has never been better illustrated than that afternoon as I didn’t speak Chinese and Zong didn’t speak English…

Zong showed us a few videos of the activities of the Beijing Ukulele Club so I could see her husband perform with other Chinese ukulele players, some of them very young (notice the little kid on the screen).

More ukulele fun followed as we tried to find common songs in our respective songbooks. The atmosphere of the shop became even more international when two more of Connie‘s friends, Filipino-Chinese Shasha and Craig from England joined us. Craig played the guitar along to my and Connie‘s ukulele strumming.

After this memorable ukulele session, we went out to eat together.

This afternoon has been so brilliant it’s been the highlight of my trip to China. I am so very grateful to Al for putting me in contact with Connie and to Connie for her kindness, her welcome and for organising the afternoon so I could make the most out of it. I definitely hope we will meet again one day.

Thanks a million to Zong who let us try all the ukuleles and play all afternoon in her shop.

Once more the ukulele has proven its magic!

05 2011

FIUL: International Ukulele Fest of Lerrain

Quite a few people have asked me if I knew Meylie Mellow and Rel-Bar, the organisers of the FIUL festival (International Ukulele Festival of Lerrain) and I couldn’t say that I did.

I have therefore contacted Meylie Mellow and Rel-Bar to find out more about themselves and about the upcoming Uke Fest which will take place on the 17th/18th and 19th of June 2011 in the North-East of France, in the tiny village of Lerrain.

U&L: Meylie Mellow and Rel-Bar, what can you tell us to introduce yourselves ?

Meylie Mellow: I’m 25, I was born in the Vosges region where the festival will take place.

I’ve met Rel-Bar, my boyfriend, in Paris where I have moved because of my job as a web designer. During the day time I work for Le Figaro, the famous French newspaper and in the evening my skills come in handy for the FIUL!

Otherwise I’m an outgoing person, I like to welcome people and make them feel at home. I also have a great family sense.

Rel-Bar: I’m Aurélien aka Rel-Bar, 35 years old and born in Pau in South-western France.

I moved to Paris 6 years ago for my job and am now Business Consultant for a Danish software company.

Adeline aka Meylie Mellow and I met in a music store around a Martin ukulele and it was love at first sight… for the uke of course! ;o))

Otherwise I’m a retired skateboarder, been riding for over 20 years and I guess I’m an easy going person.

U&L: Can you tell us about your ukulele background, how you’ve discovered the ukulele, how long you have been playing and the style of music you are playing.?

Meylie Mellow: I discovered the ukulele 2 years ago. My brother bought me one for my birthday. I tried it out but I stuck to playing guitar until I went to Corsica for the summer vacation. Since I couldn’t bring my guitar along with me I took my uke. Gradually I played less and less guitar and more and more uke.

I have a tendency to play sad emotive country or folk songs.

Meylie Mellow performing Jimmy (Moriarty)

Rel-Bar: Back in the years I had tried out playing guitar but I couldn’t be bothered to play bar chords so I quit! 3 years ago I walked past a music store where a uke was on display. I thought I could probably handle bar chords on 4 strings so I bought it. Since then I have never let it down and bought many more! I love music so I play everything that sounds good to my ears!

U&L: Who are your favourite ukulele artists ?

Meylie Mellow: I like the fact that ukulele is a bit underground. Usually, I’m not interested by major music stars which I think lack of soul.

I can’t really say that I have favourite ukulele artists. I just love the uke’s musical & personality diversity, mostly when it’s without any kind of pretension thus the mellow in Meylie Mellow!

Rel-Bar: I consider every single uke player as an artist! Roy Smeck and George Formby have amazing skills, UOGB is really good but I can’t go without GUGUG, khillbillycaldera, unclejeff64, ukecrazybitches, …

Meylie Mellow and Rel-Bar covering an original song by UncleJeff64, Git off the road Mamaw

U&L: Could you describe the concept behind the FIUL festival ?

Meylie Mellow & Rel-Bar: The concept is quite simple, inspired by Mainland Mike‘s UWC (Ukulele World Congress), with our added “French Touch”.

The FIUL is a laid back international ukulele get-together where every single player will be welcomed and considered as a star no matter his/her level.

Our goal is to focus and to put into the light casual ukulele players thru our festival & website. On a daily basis, we update www.fiul.fr with contents sent to us by attending ukulelists: interv’ukes, pictures, songs…

U&L: Are there any ukulele players or bands booked for the festival ?

Meylie Mellow & Rel-Bar: We won’t have any “performers” but expect Gus & Fin to be the patrons of this first edition.

Every attending uke player will be considered as a performer and have access to our open mic stage. The list of players is available here. You can register to attend or play on our website or at the following address: festival.ukulele@gmail.com.

U&L: Can you tell us about the workshops that are planned ?

Meylie Mellow & Rel-Bar: At the time being we expect to have two non-official workshops (to be confirmed): the first one will be a beginner’s workshop for kids or newbies, the second one would allow the players to record a song of their choice for us to put out a FIUL souvenir CD.

****

For more information about the FIUL, visit their website and register for their weekly newsletter.

The FIUL website is updated on a regular basis and provides a wealth of information about the Vosges region where the festival will be held, places to visit, etc…

Befriend the FIUL on Facebook

Follow the FIUL on Twitter

31 2010

2010 : A Ukulele Year In Perspective

As the year 2010 comes to a close, it is time for me to look back and reflect on another amazing ukulele year.

Before doing just this, let me wish you all a very happy and enriching New Year 2011.

I’d also like to take the opportunity to thank all the readers who have subscribed to Ukulele & Languages. Seeing my growing number of subscribers is a big encouragement to carry on.

As this is going to be a rather lengthy post, and because I know many new ‘Christmas ukulele players’ will mostly be looking for information on how to play, I have chosen to organise my review of the year 2010 according to the categories of my site rather than chronologically.

I hope this is a good way for newcomers to get an idea what’s on the blog and for everyone to quickly gain access to what they are most interested in.

The last part of this post, which falls under the Ukulele & Languages category will be a more personal look at the major ukulele-related events that I have experienced in 2010.

Ukulele Beginner : Learning to play the ukulele

As a new player, it can prove very frustrating to type the keywords ‘Ukulele Tutorial’ in YouTube and hope to find videos which really do explain something.

This is why I have compiled a few posts with a selection of valuable ukulele tutorials, providing proper explanations.

- 7 ukulele tutorials for strumming and fingerpicking

- 5 thoughts on learning fingerstyle or classical ukulele

- 5 tutorials to play barre chords on the ukulele

- Improve your ukulele technique : a tip by Herman Vandecauter

Ukulele World Tour : Ukulele playing around the world

Another focus of this blog is to look at what people make out of the ukulele in different parts of the world.

The Weekly Ukulele World Tour posts bring you a selection of ukulele videos in various languages from different cultures and are a great way to travel around the world if your budget doesn’t allow you to do so in real life.

I have compiled a list of the interviews I have done this year, so enjoy meeting ukulele players from around the globe:

- Eugen, Ukulele singer and songwriter from Ukraine

- Ukulele SunnyBoy, Alpine Ukulele from Switzerland

- Gawasiman, Ukulele arranger from Japan

- Ukulollo, Ukulele player and Video making specialist from Italy

- Svavar Knútur, a Guitar and Ukulele Troubadour from Iceland

- Amelia Robinson from the US and her ukulele experience on the Pearl Qatar

- Marcelo Mendes E Os Bacanas from Brazil

- Les Poupées Gonflées from France

Ukulele Albums

The highlight in the Ukulele Albums category this year is the review of Craig Robertson latest CD, Better Liar.

Thanks to Craig for all the exchange of ideas this year and for his precious tips on overcoming stage fright (even when the stage is just your own living room and you’re just playing for family/friends)

Here is Undead from the CD Better Liar for those of you who don’t already know Craig Robertson. It’s good know that he is working on a new CD which should come out very soon.

Language Fun

This category of the blog focuses on languages, funny translations, anything that has to do with toying with words in various languages, dialects, and different accents.

The amount of posts I publish in this category really depends on how much travel I do in a year as trips abroad are a main source of language fun.

Most successful posts of the category this year are :

- The international language of swearing. This is a post I particularly enjoyed writing.

- Accents

- Funny shop names in the Netherlands

Ukulele & Languages major highlights of 2010

Here we come to the more personal part of this post. Just like last year, I am really impressed at what consequences playing the ukulele has had on my life in 2010.

The one thing I am most thankful for this year is having managed to convert my best friend to the ukulele. Playing with him on a regular basis has been a most enriching experience, and my ukulele skills have improved much more in the last few months playing with him than they had before trying to figure out everything on my own. I am really amazed at how much playing together fuels each other’s creativity.

Here is a cover we’ve had fun working on:

Paint It Black Ukulele Cover

An important event this year has been the visit of Herman Vandecauter. Herman stayed a weekend here and shared many tips, fixed the action of my uke and accepted to do an interview for the first Uke Hunt Podcast. There was so much to learn from him! He treated us with a home concert on both the ukulele and the classical guitar.

Another excellent time this year has been the visit of Alex from the COULE. We played a great ukulele trio and this triggered many laughs. We’re looking forward to your next visit, Alex!

I am very thankful to my favourite ukulele blogger, Al from Uke Hunt, for his continued support and for being an inspiration to carry on. Thanks to Al‘s very own writing style, my repertoire of idioms and dodgy English expressions is kept alive and I often find myself grinning when reading his posts.

Al really surprised me this year when he did a cover of a tune I had written (by ear), Year Shift.

Year Shift as covered by Al :

Back in April, I attended the PUB (Paris Ukulele Bazaar) where I was very pleased to meet Ken Middleton, Lorenzo, and my friend Alex from the COULE.

Another good friend of the blog is Lou Armer, who’s been doing the excellent Uke Hunt podcasts.

Lou did a ukulele show for the Chorlton Arts Radio back in May this year and I was honoured and really nervous when she asked me for an interview.
Lou promised on Tumblr that she would do proper recordings in 2011.
We are all looking forward to hear those recordings, Lou!

Jim D’Ville, the Play Ukulele by Ear specialist, interviewed me for his blog and asked me really interesting questions about the similarities between learning a language and learning to play a musical instrument. You can read the interview on his site.

Other than that, my UAS (Ukulele Acquisition Syndrome) has been pretty acute this year, with the acquisition of 3 new ukes, a wonderful-sounding Koaloha Concert Pikake, a Kala pocket uke (so easy to carry around even when you’re business travelling) and more recently, a Pono MB baritone ukulele to add a bit of variety to the family.

I wrote an original (by ear again) for my baritone uke which I had the pleasant surprise to see featured on Jeff‘s Humble Baritonics blog.

What an eventful year ! Let’s hope 2011 will have as much in store. Well, I am not planning to buy 3 more ukes though…

With a new year coming along, now is the time for you to express your wishes on what you’d like to see on Ukulele & Languages in 2011. Please leave a comment to let me know!

07 2010

New uke : Pono MB Baritone Ukulele

I have been rather distracted this week with the arrival of my new ukulele last Friday, a Pono MB Baritone ukulele. As a result there won’t be any Ukulele Weekly World Tour  this week.

I ordered my Pono baritone from ukebox.fr , a French website selling ukes. I can really recommend the site as I received top service and the owner was very helpful and friendly when I called to enquire about my uke.

This Pono Baritone MB is made of solid mahogany, with a rosewood fingerboard and bridge and came with Ko’olau strings.

A baritone ukulele is very different from the other ukes and the best way to discover its  character is to play it till your fingers are sore. That’s exactly what I have been doing instead of looking for ukulele videos from around the world.

First thing is to get used to having bass strings _ the GCEA ukulele is my first instrument. The baritone ukulele is tuned DGBE which means you have to re-learn the names of the chords. For example, if you play a C chord on the baritone like you would on a GCEA uke, it is in fact a G chord. And this can quickly become rather confusing when you switch from the baritone to your soprano or concert uke.

I didn’t have the patience to take the time to re-learn all the chords so I’ve just tried some chord shapes I use on my concert uke and made up a melody as I went along, experimenting on intensity, picking and strumming. I’ve actually used a lot of the fingerpicking I do on my concert uke and that gives it a completely different feel on the baritone. I love the way you can play on volume  and emphasise mood changes in your music with the baritone.

Here is an original instrumental called Maelström played on my Pono baritone to give you an idea of its sound.

There are plenty of things I’d like to experiment with my baritone uke. I read somewhere that you could tune it so as to have the re-entrant tuning and that would be using DGBD tuning (the two D’s being one octave apart) but it seems like you need a different set of strings in order to do this. I wish I had more ukes as I don’t want to change the strings on the uke I have just received. So I’ll keep it DGBE for the time being.

You can hear a baritone played in re-entrant tuning here.

30 2010

A trip to the homeland of Kala-niño, my Kala pocket uke

I am just back from my express trip to the Middle Kingdom, totally burnt out after enduring the 6-hour-time difference twice in the last 6 days, and still suffering from motion sickness dizziness several days after being back.

Yet I am really glad to be back in touch with my fellow ukulele bloggers and readers, catching up on all the interesting posts I couldn’t access from China. I found out that my blog fell under the mighty censorship there too. I never realised that my writings were subversive… actually that most ukulele bloggers’ writings were too.

This explains why there has been no Weekly World Tour post last week, much against my will.

Anyhow, my very recently acquired Kala-niño (my Kala pocket uke) has made its pilgrimage to the land where it was made and I was very happy to have it around to fill my sleepless hours with its reassuring presence and joyful sound. I got to know it pretty well during this past week where I really discovered how to adapt my playing to its very small size.

Here it is, sweet and tiny, overlooking the streets of Beijing very early in the morning.

In case you are wondering why motion sickness is such an issue in China, this video should give you a pretty good idea what it’s like to be driven around Beijing. Add to this a really bumpy flight back home and you get the full picture. I wonder how it is possible to teach anyone to drive there. Are there any set of rules ?

I’m still wondering how I came out alive :)

For a nature-lover prone to contemplative moods like myself, the big cities of China and the constant sound of car horns and traffic buzz tend to be rather overwhelming, bringing to mind the following words from Azathoth by HP Lovecraft:

When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of Spring’s flowering meads; when learning stripped the Earth of her mantle of beauty and poets sang no more of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone forever, there was a man who traveled out of life on a quest into spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled.

Of the name and abode of this man little is written, for they were of the waking world only; yet it is said that both were obscure. It is enough to say that he dwelt in a city of high walls where sterile twilight reigned, that he toiled all day among shadow and turmoil, coming home at evening to a room whose one window opened not to open fields and groves but on to a dim court where other windows stared in dull despair. From that casement one might see only walls and windows, except sometimes when one leaned so far out and peered at the small stars that passed. And because mere walls and windows must soon drive a man to madness who dreams and reads much, the dweller in that room used night after night to lean out and peer aloft to glimpse some fragment of things beyond the waking world and the tall cities.[...]

Just to prove my point, here are some pictures of tall towers, some with a very interesting architecture that seems to defy common building rules  :

And this is what a burnt tower looks like…

Incidentally, the domain ukulelelanguages.com has been registered exactly a year ago today (although I started blogging about the ukulele in June 2008) and the number of visitors has increased steadily ever since, encouraging me to carry on in my quest for ukulele videos from around the world.

Since the 30th of August 2009, according to Google Analytics, Ukulele & Languages has received over 25 600 visits from 133 different countries. I am very pleased by the number of different countries who land on this blog.  Just seeing the names of all the countries far and near is enough to keep me travelling ! Thank you all !

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