Learning Jake Shimabukuro songs

I plan on doing some blogging about my learning process for the ukulele up to this point. Before I get to that, I just wanted to write a little bit about learning to play some songs by Jake Shimabukuro.

I first learned about Jake when I was browsing Youtube looking for ukulele related videos and lessons. I think it was maybe a month or two after I started learning the ukulele when I came across this video, which had already been seen by millions of people:


I was so completely blown away by it I searched iTunes store and downloaded his "Gently Weeps" album almost immediately. For me, the album showed me just what can be done on the humble instrument that is the ukulele. I dreamed of one day learning to play "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". I was listening to the song in my car constantly, over and over again. I thought I would never be able to play it or any of the other Jake songs.

After learning various chords and being somewhat adapt at chord changes in the first position during the first few months of my ukulele playing, I thought I'd try for more of a challenge. In May of this year, I contacted Dominator about obtaining the tabs for "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". I had searched high and low for it and it seemed like he was the only one who had these tabs but was asked to remove them from his site. I thought it was worth a shot to ask him for it, and he was very generous in sharing it with me. I was really excited about trying to learn it and got to work on it right away. To my surprise, the gist of the song wasn't all that difficult. I was playing something that resembles the song within a few days. Maybe because I already knew what the song sounded like forwards and backwards, but it wasn't the impossible song to learn as I had previously thought. So after getting to the point where I can play it from memory, I asked Dominator for another one of Jake's tabs. He asked me to send him a video or MP3 of me playing the song to make sure I had put forth enough effort in learning it before sending me another set of tabs. I thought this was very good of him as it kept me working on one song at a time.

So lately, these Jake songs I've learned are all I've been playing on my spare time, as you can deduce from my Youtube postings. These songs are fairly challenging but not at all impossible to learn, even for a relative novice like me. It is so much fun playing these songs and thanks to these songs, my ukulele experience has been exponentially more enjoyable than it had been before. And it wasn't bad before.:)