A Song for a Quarantine: Learning the Ukulele

By: Zane Tinker

We’ve all been thrust into an interesting situation with this quarantine, everybody is stuck at home all of a sudden with a lot more time on their hands. This leads to the question, what is one to do with all this extra time?

Yes, most of us love lounging around, but it’s times like this where we have a chance to do something new and check something off of our bucket list. So many people have newfound time and everybody is going to something different with it.

My entire life I have been surrounded by music of all sorts, I’ve sang in various choirs and I have played percussion instruments for well over half a decade.

 I am using this quarantine as an excuse to finally teach myself the Ukulele.  The Ukulele is a Hawaiian string instrument that I can play as I sing. Singing while playing a percussion instrument can be a lot more challenging.  

Teaching myself this instrument hasn’t been nearly as easy as I anticipated, I never expected learning how to use a fret board would be as confusing as it actually turned out to be.  For someone with large hands like myself, the instrument and its strings are quite small. My finger tips weren’t used to pushing down the strings and they felt sore after an hour of practicing. Even so I am making progress, however slow it may be.

Although I’m not too proficient at the Ukulele yet, this experience has been very beneficial, by giving me time to reflect on myself as well as the position I’m in. 

---