Ukulele? Why did you decide to play that?

This is a question I often get when I tell people that I am learning to play the ukulele.  I don't know if I can adequately explain it here, but I will try.

I've had a love/hate affair with music as long as I can remember.   I got kicked out of chorus in fourth grade for talking too much, then started piano lessons.  I then quit piano in fifth grade when I started clarinet lessons.  I really wanted to play in a school group, and I guess I figured I wouldn't get kicked out of band for talking if I had a clarinet in my mouth.   My mother was determined to make me take both, because at one point I wanted to quit both, but we compromised and settled on clarinet.  I continued my clarinet lessons for almost 10 years and I am pretty sure it is what kept me sane in high school.

In the fall of 1999, I started music school for my first semester in college.  I was going to major in Music Education and had my heart set on becoming a high school music teacher.  This dream lasted 4 months before I gave up and came home to enroll in the local community college.  Music school made me hate music.  I was miserable.  I was lonely.  It made me vehemently hate playing the clarinet.  I wanted nothing to do with any of it, especially music theory.  I didn't care about the "Four Seasons." Bach bored me to death and as much as I enjoyed Mozart, he certainly wasn't making me learn anything.  Spending four hours a day in a 6x8 practice room with a single light bulb and no windows was not the ideal way to spend my freshman year.   In a eerie case of foreshadowing, I got a C- in Clarinet and an A in Vocal Technique.

I came home, achieved my two year degree and immediately transferred to a four year school to major in Psychology which is what all music school dropouts major in.  I quit clarinet cold turkey and didn't look back for almost 10 years.

I eventually took a job in corporate america, toiling away in a cube for a steady paycheck.  My job has nothing to do with music and nothing do with psychology or anything else I studied in college for that matter.  It is simply a place where I go from 9 to 5 and then come home to play with my cat.

In early 2009, after a period of personal crisis, I decided to turn to music once again to get my mind of things.  In high school I turned to music as a form of therapy and it really allowed me to indulge my creativity and forget about everything else.  The problem is, I was now 28 years old, and I didn't have a clue what I wanted to play.  The only thing I knew for sure was that I did not want to play the clarinet.  So one night, while at a conference for work, I retired to my room immediately after dinner (the hard partying sales lifestyle is not for me) and started googling local music teachers in my area.  This is how I found my voice teacher on Craigslist.  (By the way, she is the only thing I've ever found on Craigslist, because I find Craigslist creepy.)  I decided, what the heck, why not go out on a limb and learn to sing.  I've always liked singing along to the radio, or pretending I was a Sweet Adeline next to my mother.

She was just starting her business in this area, and I was lucky to be one of her very first students.  We meshed well because I had no clue what I was doing, or even what I wanted sing.  But we figured it out and I started immediately to feel like I had a purpose.  It turned into a weekly reprieve for me to get away from everything that was bombarding me in my day job.

We became fast friends as she taught me the basics of vocal technique and how to apply it to popular music.  We picked a few karaoke tracks to work on and by October of the same year, I was singing a Norah Jones song by myself, on a famous stage while my friends and fellow students looked on.  People clapped and I felt great!

I learned from her that music is more than just about technique and standards as I was taught in music school.  Music is about emotion and connecting my personal experiences with the audience.  Performance is a shared experience and no matter how alone you may feel on that stage,  you are not alone, because there is a room full of people who want to share this experience with you.

When I performed with the concert band on my clarinet, I never really got nervous because I was playing with 100 other people.  I was relatively anonymous.  Singing alone on a stage, made me feel much more vulnerable and exposed.  This was it.  This was me.

I quickly made friends with the other students in this studio and learned that while were are all at different stages in our lives and different levels of ability, we were all there for the essentially the same reason.  We wanted to share our music.

Ok, I realize this is getting long winded and you still don't know the answer to "why the ukulele?"  I started to want to accompany myself, but after my negative piano experience when I was 10 and a severe intimidation of the guitar, the ukulele seemed like a perfect fit.  It's small, it has four strings, which for a non string player, makes sense to me because I have four fingers.  It was inexpensive, my first uke cost only $50 on eBay.  There was one challenge though, there are no ukulele teachers in my area.  How was I going to learn?  YouTube!  Within a week of getting the uke home, I knew 3 chords that I learned from YouTube.  Within two months, I was accompanying myself, as I sang a song with the same three chords at an open mic, with real people in the audience.

My skills are rudimentary at best, but now I know a few more than 3 chords and I have TWO songs under my belt!  I love the ukulele because of it's simple, happy sound.  Because it is a happy instrument, it brings me joy to play, most of the time.  I hate it sometimes because it's hard to learn without a teacher or mentor.  I feel a little like I'm on an island playing, and I don't yet have an audience to share it with.  I have not yet found other ukulele players to connect with, but I'm sure they must be out there.