Alfred's Teach Yourself to Play Ukulele, C-Tuning: Everything You Need to Know to Start Playing Now!

by Morton Manus

Learn to play the ukulele and open up a brand new world of musical knowledge with this exciting method from Alfred. Beginners of all ages can start their journey to a lifetime of musical enjoyment. Beginning with the fundamentals, you will learn about the history of the ukulele, its components, how to hold and tune it, and getting acquainted with standard musical notation. You will then move right along to playing different notes, chords, scales, and songs, lesson by lesson, all while continuing to increase your ever-growing knowledge of reading and understanding standard musical notation and playing a variety of well-known songs. You will learn different strumming techniques to help you play in a variety of musical styles. The book also contains a section teaching you how to play by ear. Upon completion of the book, you will be able to play your favorite songs on the ukulele in any key and know how to read music.

The book features the following resources for reference during and after your
* Transposition chart
* Dictionary of tablature techniques
* Ukulele fingerboard chart
* Complete ukulele chord dictionary

This book teaches entirely in C tuning. The D tuning edition of Alfred's Teach Yourself to Play Ukulele (item 14135) is available from your favorite music retailer and at Alfred.com.

Be your own teacher, and let Alfred be your resource every step of the way.

Genres: Music

64 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1995

About the author

Morton Manus was president of Alfred Music Publishing from 1952–2016, a company founded by his father Sam Manus in 1922 in New York.

Reviews

[Libby]

This is a fantastic first book to teach you to start playing the Ukulele, BUT (and this is a really really big but...) this is the only place I have seen that has you tune the strings to A D F# B. WHY?!!! SOOO ANNOYING!!! I'm not an expert (obviously. this is why I'm reading it...) but every other source I've seen tunes the Uke to G C E A. This changes all the chords by a whole step. It should be sooo easy to change this! Why did they do that? Someone please tell me! So I was TRYING to read through his exercises and even though it would say "this is how you play a G chord" I would think to myself, NO this is actually an A. But it's too confusing to do that as a beginner.

Otherwise, it's great! It has you practice a chord with a rhythm, and then has several simple songs that you can play and sing that only require a few chords. I want badly to give this book 5 stars, but I just canNOT because of the different string tuning.