As February approaches (on this snowy Sunday morning), I thought it might be a good idea to pencil out a journal entry regarding the upcoming 100-DayProject2024. This project is a world-wide effort, open to anyone so inclined, to focus on the practice of her or his art, whatever that may be. In my case, the focus will be on playing the ukulele – not so much to concentrate on learning new songs or playing songs flawlessly, but on the practice itself. The 2024 Uke project starts March 1, 2024.

Some folks who join the 100 Day Uke Project adopt the routine of playing something on their ukulele everyday and posting it on Instagram, using the hashtag above (or a similar tag) to identify their work with the 100-DayProject 2024. This year will, I think, be my fifth year of participation. In the past I tried the play-and-post daily format, but I did not like the amount of time I spent posting stuff – the technical side, one might say – as opposed to simply playing music.

100DaysUke2023

Last year during the 2023 Project, I settled into a pattern of posting every few days to mark progress or report on what I have been doing. In spring 2023, I posted over 40 videos in 100 days. These are available on my Instagram channel https://www.instagram.com/uropha/

Last year, my main focus was on learning to play the baritone ukulele. The baritone is somewhere in between a conventional four-string ukulele and a standard six-string guitar. Most ukuleles (not baritones) are tuned to GCEA (or gCEA, so called reentrant tuning), while baritones most often are tuned to DGBE, like the 4 highest-pitch strings of a guitar.

I also added a second goal of accompanying myself on baritone uke with harmonica playing, which I sort-of did by overdubbing tracks of harmonica using GarageBand software. But again, this strategy led me down another technical computer-heavy path that I didn’t care for. You can see a snippet of the fruits of my labor in a compilation video at the following video link: https://youtu.be/8f6O6JpAMEw?si=wJKxAso6kvJmrrwf  My little snippet begins at time stamp 45:19.

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2024 Project – Lateral thinking

This year I am taking a different approach for my 100 Day ukulele project. The main focus will be on the way I like to explore music by a kind of “free-association”, for lack of a better term. This method involves exploring lateral connections, either identified a priori as an organizing principle, or links that may arise along the paths of exploration. Rather than try to describe it, let me illustrate by an example, as diagrammed in my journal (below).

Here the initial organizing prompt is “Bob Music”, defined as music written by people named Bob… Bob Dylan, for example. That idea launches an exploration of the enormous catalogue of Dylan’s music. I am free to pick whatever songs I like. Now, frankly, I generally don’t care for his performances of his own songs, and he didn’t play ukulele, and he doesn’t always play in a key that I like to play or sing, so right there I have some work – practice – to do to adapt any given Dylan song to my voice and my interpretation on solo ukulele. Tempo, style, different ukulele woods, strings, chord voicings, songs based on the same chord progressions – these all provide other rich avenues of exploration. I can follow whichever theme comes to mind or whatever path I choose.

Of course, plenty of other musicians have recorded their own versions of Dylan songs (“covers”), and some of these covers are excellent. I like Jimmy LaFave’s stylistic interpretation of “You’re a Big Girl Now”, for instance. And although my vocal range is nowhere near as high as Jimmy’s, I can transpose and learn from Jimmy.

This in turn, opens a new door: Jimmy music. We have Jimmy LaFave, Jimmy Reed, Jimi Hendrix…

Returning to the original “Bob Music” prompt, I could include Bob Seger’s work, the catalog of Bob Marley, or songs by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, etc….

So there you have it: the lateral thinker’s guide to exploring ukulele. We shall see how this all plays out, sometime around June 8, 2024!