At age 43 after ten years of trying to memorize banjo tab and then play it back, my wife’s grandmother gave me a 70 year old Columbia Hawaiian soprano ukulele that had been in her closet for more than 50 years. To please grandma, I took the uke and bought an instruction book. But I was tired of memorizing music out of books!

That approach did not turn me into a musician on the banjo and I doubted that I would have a different outcome on the ukulele. So I just practiced chord progressions and inversions and listening to the sounds I was making. I found I was developing an emotional relationship with the chords I was playing and realized why songwriters choose specific chords to garner a certain emotional response from the listener. My mission then was to teach other adult beginners the fundamentals of music from an ear-based approach, Play Ukulele By Ear.