Learning Musical Instrument: Ukulele

Amidst the lockdowns, I had been bothered about my life’s direction. What am I doing! What is the purpose of my life! What should I do to make myself feel good! Among all such thoughts, I got to two conclusions so far:

One: that I need to have a life goal which is to help others in education, as posted in my blog What I will do in my life.

Two: that I will continue to have a creative space in my life, which can allow me to do new things.

Many friends helped shape me the second point above, including Shahshank Srivastava, who is an awesome guitarist. As of now, I have not settled down on what things I will do to enjoy creativity but only on the point that I will have a creative space where I will keep exploring new things. An easy low hanging fruit was learning the easiest music instrument and hence my fad with Ukulele started.

There were few thoughts that I had settled in my head, like why Ukulele and not the guitar. And the following were my reasons:

1. Ukulele is small and hence carryable while Guitar cannot be carried with me all the time in flights, etc. Yes, I considered flights and travelling even in the middle of a pandemic because one day we will be through that.

2. Ukulele is cheap and so is it’s maintenance. It cost me just 30$ (~1500 INR) and I was able to get started! Guitar runs into hundreds of dollars (Yamaha Guitar with my roommate is over ~250$) and the price tag kept me hesitant to invest atleast in the exploratory stage.

3. Ukulele is slightly more gentle on the finger with its nylon strings compared to the steel strings of a Guitar. Ukulele’s learning curve for most folks is not very steep. Per my survey on YouTube, many people were able to play a few songs with just a month of getting started!

4. I explored other options atleast in my head, learning Urdu script (since language may be familiar to me) or learning Chinese or learning Sketching/Drawing/Painting or learning Skates. But none of those provided an offer of a quick win in my life. So, I postponed all of them for a later date.

Now as far as this blog is concerned, it is only to retrospectively announce that I had started learning Ukulele and explain my thoughts around it. As of date, I am playing-along a few songs albeit with basic chords in under a month of practice. It has been a very relieving experience so far. I can use the same set of chords on a multitude of songs including devotional ones like Hanuman Chalisa, rock songs like Stairway to Heaven and emotional/romantic Hindi songs like Lag ja gale se or Agar tum sath ho…

I feel utterly delighted to be able to play music!

I know there is a long to mastery and I am not cent per cent sure whether I will be able to follow through with music as my habit or would it die as just another experiments in my life. As long as I am enjoying everything makes sense!