Welcome to the Tourist’s Guide!
The Tourist’s Guide teaches ukulele from the perspective of basic humans with minimal exposure to music training or maximum frustration with music performance and helps people “get on the bus” . . . playing and singing with others.
My mission is to help people play without first learning to read music. Reading music can be a handy skill—especially for researching songs—but it isn’t and shouldn’t be a pre-requisite to enjoying the ukulele.
Currently this site is for use mainly by my students. I hope someday soon to expand it to include a blog about teaching and learning and the basics of my approach to teaching music theory through the ukulele.
100 Days of Ukulele 2025
I’m participating in Cynthia Lin’s 100 Days of Ukulele challenge this year.
I’m working on my sixth video today, and will be posting links to the videos here, on or before the next Tuesday class on March 11. (I’m still working on some YouTube issues.)
Local News & Schedule Updates
The Tuesday Class leads a sing-along concert at the 2024 Street Fair. We gathered on the Senior Center Patio and did a darn good job!
In August of 2024 Susan worked with Chris Murphy, who heads the Yellow Springs Ukulele Club, to create a display at the Yellow Springs Library showing different kinds of ukuleles.
The Tuesday Class, Tuesdays, 10-11:30 am
The Tuesday Class meets at the Senior Center. This is an all levels class. It’s fine to just show up when you can.
“Monthly Play and Sing Sessions”
The last Tuesday of each month (10-11:30 am) is a lesson-free get together. You are welcome to participate with your ukulele even if you are not in the Tuesday Class. You are also welcome to attend if you want to get together and sing with other people.
The Quick Start
The Quick Start helps people who are new to the ukulele, or who don’t remember what they once knew, to get started playing. There is no charge. I provide a book and chord chart to Quick Start students. We meet at the senior center by appointment. Contact me by email, mrsthewolfsweb@gmail.com, or, contact me through the Senior Center.
The Yellow Springs Ukulele Club
The club, run by Chris Murphy, also meets at the Senior Center. Meetings are on the first Saturday of the month from 6 to 8:30 pm. You can get more information by sending an email to Chris Murphy: fourstringfun@icloud.com.
Upcoming Dates for Senior Center Ukulele Events
The next Tuesday class is on January 21.
The next “Play and Sing Session” is during class time on January 28.
There is no charge for any of the ukulele activities at the Senior Center.
The Tuesday Class
The “Tuesday Class” is all levels. We start with a kick-off song, then have a “skill builder” lesson, where we learn or practice strums, chord transitions and other useful stuff. Then we play and sing.
I don’t post the class song sheets on the web. If you’re looking for an online source of song sheets, I recommend “Jim’s Ukulele Song Book” (it’s also called “ozbcoz”. Jim’s book is HUGE, so it’s quicker to put a particular song title in your internet search followed by “ozbocz".
On the following pages you’ll find:
Lesson Summaries
Songs We Are Working On
Web Links to skills
Web Links to Current New Songs
Lesson Summaries
ON TUESDAY 01.14.25 WE TALKED ABOUT/WORKED ON:
FINGERPICKING
There is interest in learning fingerpicking.
We worked on the alternating thumb picking pattern. I’ll have a worksheet for this next Tuesday when we work on it again. (So named because your thumb alternates between the G and C Strings.)
HOW TO PLAY AS A FOUR-BEAT STRUM:
Beat One, play the G string with your thumb moving down (towards your foot)
Beat Two, play the E and A Strings at the same time, plucking up towards your chin. Your index finger is on the E string and your middle finger is on the A string.
Beat Three, play the C string with your thumb, moving down towards your foot
Beat Four, repeat Beat Two instructions
I WILL ASK YOU NEXT WEEK
a) An idea for one Christmas song that you really like and we haven’t sung before. We’ll work on one per week beginning about July/August. I need it now so I can do research and learn songs before we start working on them in class.
b) 1-6 Beatles songs you like. This is in preparation for our mid-year public singalong.
BEATLES
We did a quick try-out on four Beatles songs.
Eleanor Rigby (a 2-chord song)
Hey Jude
In My Life (a lot of chords!)
Yellow Submarine
Those four are attached. I’m not making copies yet because they are still in the “proofreading” and “how do we want to sing this?” stage.
MY GOAL FOR THIS YEAR
The reason I’m trying to organize in advance is to make class smoother and even more fun as time goes by . . . to do that it’s a big help for me to have an idea what we will be working on well in advance so that I can make the song sheets less “rough-drafty” and I will already know the melodies when we start singing them.
WHAT’S NEW
I’m planning to stay until noon so that if you have specific questions, things you, individually, want help understanding or working on, we can do that after class. Please reserve time by emailing me in advance, so I can ready to be helpful.
Lyrics and Chords for a Song We Are Working On.
Useful Web Links
Links to Skills:
Alternating Thumb Pick
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mACJEWzpAM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKtPE3HfL5c
Harmony Singing: