Cognito Town

While I was in Oahu at the beginning of March, I took a ukulele lesson with Bruce Shimabukuro. He taught me a song called Cognito Town. He went over the main picking parts and the chords with me during the lesson. I thought it was a pretty easy song to learn and picked it up within the one hour lesson. Later during that trip I decided to buy Bruce's album called Incognito that had this song. When I heard it from his actual album, I realized that he taught me the song at about a quarter of the speed he played it on the CD. It also had some drums and bass parts too. I decided to try and learn it at the speed it was played on the CD and also the few extra parts Bruce didn't cover during the lesson. The end result is what you see below.

For this video, I played the chords on the Ko'olau CE-1 and recorded it using Audacity. I then played it back on the laptop speaker during the video and played the picking parts over those chords. To be honest the sound quality coming out of the speakers was pretty crappy and while I picked the melody, I thought it didn't sound too hot. But I think after it's picked up by the camera's microphone combined with the picking, it actually sounded like an OK approximation of the song on the video. I think. But hey, you don't get to learn a song from the guy who wrote it very often right?

Anyway, I think Bruce's CD is pretty good, and if you want to check out Cognito Town with the full ensemble with bass and drums, be sure to track down a copy of Incognito.