Once you’ve mastered all the preschool songs in my Beginner Uke for Preschool Teachers series, you may find you’ve fallen in love with ukulele and want to learn more.

Finding Tutorials

Here’s my approach: Most mornings when I’m playing on my ukulele, I think of a song I want to work on, go to YouTube and search for “[song title] ukulele tutorial” and then work through the tutorials I find.

Working through a Book

I’ve also used the book Daily Ukulele (Amazon affiliate link). I flip to the next song, try it on my own, then search for tutorials of it to build more skills or search on YouTube for “[song title] play-along” if I am feeling confident and ust want to practice playing it at tempo.

The book Rise Up Singing is a common resource used by sing-along groups and camps, but it is not a good resource for a beginning uke player. But many of the songs in there are quite do-able if you look elsewhere for chord charts. I created a collection of singalongs from the songbook Rise Up Singing.

Recommended YouTube Channels

Here are the YouTube channels I have learned the most from:

• Bernadette: @BernadetteTeachesMusic
• Cynthia Lin: @cynthialinmusic
• Morristown Uke Jam: @MorristownUkeJam
• Ukulele Story Time: @roseoyamotmusic
• Lara Markowitz: @LaraMarkowitzMusic
• Alice Bulmer: @alicebulmermusic351
• And John’s Ukelele Cafe who plays through every song in Daily Ukulele

Someday I’ll be good enough to keep up with: Matt Dahlberg and Christopher Davis-Shannon.

Many of those instructors have Patreons, where for a small monthly fee you can access PDF song sheets, additional tutorials, live jams and lots of other supplemental material.

Finding Song Sheets with Chords

Morristown has all of their song sheets available for free. My local ukulele groups on the Eastside of Seattle have some free songbook PDF’s with lots of fun songs to play along to. Several of the YouTuber’s I mention above have Paterons where you can download song sheets.

Or, for any song you want to learn, you can do a google image search for “[song title] chords” or “[song title] ukulele chords” and usually come up with several versions in different keys – play around to find the one that suits your voice best. Most preschool teachers lean toward the key of C, as it suits young voices well. Many chord charts designed for guitar are in the key of E, and that is a more challenging chord on ukulele.

Playing with a Group

If you really want to improve your playing, find other people to play ukulele with!! Search for a group in your area – they’re often free, drop-in-anytime groups. Or if you can’t find one locally, there are some online groups as well.

Most will have a songbook – sometimes a printed copy, but more often a PDF you can download and either print at home or use on a tablet. When you first go, it may feel really intimidating! Here are a few “cheats” to make it more manageable.

• don’t try fancy strums – just do downstrums on each beat – or even just one downstrum at the start of every measure
• if you only know some chords, just play on those chords and sit out the others! Like every time a C or F shows up, you can play those measures, and then sit and wait through the Bflat and the E, until they get back to something you’re comfortable with
• 7’s are optional – if the song sheet says G7, it’s OK to play G. (Note: minors are not optional! If everyone else is playing C minor and you’re playing C, it won’t sound right.)

Have fun playing ukulele!!