Tag Archives: ukulele tutorials

Resources for Learning Ukulele

Once you’ve mastered all those 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.

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” and then work through the tutorials I find.

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 want to practice playing it at tempo.

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

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. Morristown has all of their song sheets available for free.

I’m working on a collection of singalongs from the songbook Rise Up Singing.

If you want written chords for songs; For any song you want to learn, you can do a google image search for “[song title] ukulele chords” and come up with several versions in different keys – play around to find the one that suits your voice best. 

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. My group, on the Eastside of Seattle has some free songbook PDF’s with lots of fun songs to play along to.

Have fun playing ukulele!!

More Kids’ Songs on Ukulele

This is the end of my full series on Beginner Ukulele for Preschool Teachers and Children’s Librarians. Start at the beginning!

Just for the fun of it, let’s briefly learn 8 more chords and 5 more songs:

(C) Do you know the muffin man,
the (Dm) muffin man, the (G) muffin man.
(C) Yes, I know the muffin man
he (Dm) lives on (G) Drury (C) Lane

There (D) was a farmer (G) had a (D) dog
And Bingo (A7) was his (D) name-o
B-I-(G) N-G-O! (A7) B-I (D)-N-G-O!
B-I-(G) N-G-O! And (A7) Bingo was his (D) name -o

(A) Five Green and Speckled Frogs (D) sat on a speckled log,
(A) eating some most delicious (E7) bugs. Yum yum.
(A) One jumped into the pool, (D) where it was nice and cool
(A) now there are (E7) four green and speckled (A) frogs

You’ll notice Em and B7 are the same chord shape, just shifted up or down one string. That makes it easier to transition between them, although as an intermediate player, I find I’m still not smooth at making that shift.

The (Em) ants go marching one by one hur(G)rah hurrah
The (Em) ants go marching one by one hur(G)rah hur(B7)rah
The (Em) ants go marching (D)one by one,
the (Em) little one stops to (B7)suck his thumb
and they (Em)all (D)go (Em) march(B7)ing
(Em) down (B7)to the (Em) ground
(B7)to get (Em) out (B7)of the (Em) rain.
Boom (B7)Boom (Em)Boom.