Ukulele Underground Uke 101 week 5 – playing with others. Practice by recording a background track and playing something different against it. Instead of recording to my phone I finally plugged in and practiced with my G1xON, a $70 guitar multi-effects processor, which provides different effects, rhythm, and looping capability. I am completely new to using anything like a looper so it gave me difficulties getting the timing right. That and numerous mistakes had me taping this homework over and over again. Eight takes to get it even halfway decent. The good news is that it gave me a lot of good practice!

The Ukulele I used was a Cordoba 35TS-CE strung Low-G w/LR Baggs 5.O pickup. It’s the only ukulele with a pickup that I had handy, and I needed the pickup for the looper. In retrospect, I should have switched to one of my other ukes (lord knows I’ve bought enough in the last years) that were strung High-G for the added difference in tonality.

This practice, though troublesome, was my favorite so far. I learned so much getting it to work: how to use a looper, how to get a solid, steady background track, how the LR Baggs pickup works (volume control inside the soundhole, Doh!) how to find soloing notes that sounded all right, etc.

If I look particularly tired in this video, it’s because I didn’t finish it until around 2:00 am.