Friday, June 29, 2007

I'm A Rock Star

As I've written about before, I've been trying to learn to play the ukulele over the past few months making slow, but gradual progress. My development picked up speed once I started playing with Noah, Elizabeth, and Ted. We've been practicing together now for about a month which has been absolutely thrilling for all of us. After our very first practice and after consuming a few beers, we decided to become a band. An all-soprano ukulele band, called the High Dollar Hot Dogs. (We're still working on our MySpace page.)


On Wednesday night, during a light rain (before the BIG thunderstorm), the High Dollar Hot Dogs made our debut on the front porch of a little house in the Glencoe Mill Village. We covered songs such as "Walking After Midnight," "All of Me," "Ragged But Right," and "Tonight You Belong To Me." The dozen or so folks there seemed to like it. They applauded for us, which felt so great! And I think that everyone in the band was shocked with how good we sounded. I, especially was surprised considering that I can now play several chords and sing at the same time! I usually stuff a couple socks into the back of my banjo uke to soften it, but Wednesday night, I played with only one sock!

We have another show at a party on July 14th, which is so exciting!! I still need to work on feeling confident about projecting my voice and playing loud enough for people to hear the beauty and the uniqueness of the banjo uke's sound. With enough practice, I hope that I can play without any socks at all!!!

Someone once told me that guys learned to play instruments to pick up girls. And guys typically think that girls who play in bands are hot. Will a banjo ukulele have the same effect?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

On luring the men folk with your musical prowess: I think it works both ways. Best of luck. Oh, and good luck with the music too.

christa said...

oh, i'm glad that went well! i wish i could have been there!

Gye Greene said...

Women playing instruments: At the very least, it's a good conversational opening (for the guys to come up)... :)

Sock rating: When you guys come to record, you should use this as a metric for the mix. ("I thing Noah should be one sock louder in the mix.")


--GG

Charlotte said...

I was hoping that the ukulele would be a guy magnet. But maybe only if I were a sexy, scantily-clad woman playing the ukulele.

As for the sock-metric, it only works on my ukulele since mine has an open back. The regular ukulele hole is so small that you cannot really fit a sock in there.