#Ten thumbs up ukulele plus#

However, sometimes it works best to assign each finger to a string. Most of the time, I like to assign my thumb to pluck the g-string and C-string of the ukulele (top two strings), index finger to the E-string and middle finger to the A-string (bottom string). The letters p-i-m-a represent the Spanish word for each finger, which originates from early Spanish guitar pieces. The following arpeggio exercises are designed to work out each finger in your picking hand: thumb (represented by a p), index finger (represented by an i), middle finger (represented by an m) and ring finger (represented by an a).

#Ten thumbs up ukulele plus#

In this lesson, I select ten different arpeggios exercises plus a song by the famous 19th century composer Dionisio Aguado (1784-1849) from my new book Ukulele Exercises For Dummies that you can use to increase your ease of movement, speed and accuracy as you fingerpick the ukulele. Whether your fingerpicking for rhythm or melody, practicing arpeggios is a great way to improve your fingerpicking in either style.

Or, you might pluck out the melody of a song on the ukulele without singing, sometimes known as fingerstyle or solo fingerpicking. You might use a repeating fingerpicking pattern to pick out the chord progression of a song as you sing the melody this is what I like to call rhythmic fingerpicking. Those Benadryls are really kicking in now so I’ll let Brett take over from here.įingerpicking comes in many styles on the ukulele. And to give you an idea of what’s in the book Brett’s kindly agreed to share this post on fingerpicking exercises. You can read all about the book on Ukulele Tricks. It’s out now in the UK, Canada and Australia and New Zealand. I’ve already learnt a ton from it and it’s inspired me to get more serious about practicing. I’ve been working with him on the book right from the start and he did a fantastic job with it. I’m highly allergic to the word “exercise” – I had to take half a dozen Benadryls just to write this intro – so I recommended they get Brett from Ukulele Tricks to write it. It did well enough that the Dummies folks wanted a follow up: Ukulele Exercises for Dummies. If you don’t know that I wrote Ukulele for Dummies I obviously haven’t been doing enough shameless self-promotion.