C Minor Pentatonic Scale on Ukulele

In this video we're gonna be checking out how to play the C major scale, which is one of the most fundamental scales that we can play on ukulele. But straight away I'm then gonna show you how we can turn this scale, so a set of notes, into a riff, which transforms this into something which can be so much fun. You can even come up with your own little melodies and little riffs with this set of notes that I'm gonna show you, so get excited, grab your ukulele and let's have a look at this. So when I was a kid, I thought that scales were something invented by music teachers to make me personally hate music and hate learning all the instruments that I was. Learning, be it recorder, ukulele, guitar, it just seemed like it was gonna be torture. If someone had told me that this was exactly the way to start to learn how to play melodies, how to play riffs, how to play the recognisable parts in songs, not just chords, um, I think I'd have been a lot more excited. So a scale is a series of notes which we can play in order from low to high. We can also play those notes from high to low, we call that ascending and descending. In this scale, we're going to be going from C to C and playing just 5 notes. This is the pentatonic scale. Pent, like a pentagon, that means 5. And we're gonna be playing this 5 note scale, starting from C, which is the 3rd string. On our ukulele. I will cover different options with the picking hand in a second, but let's just use the thumb for now, there's nothing wrong with a good thumb and a thumbs up when we're learning this kind of thing. So let's pick that note together. That's a C note. We're gonna play another note on that string. Which we can do either with the middle finger or the 3rd finger. I would encourage you to use your 3rd finger, but whichever feels stronger and better to you is absolutely fine, whichever feels more comfortable to you. We all have different size hands and different levels of experience. Either way, we need to play the 3rd fret on that same string. So just here, and remember to be at this side of the fret rather than this side. Let's play that note together. That is our 2nd note and we're only playing 2 notes per string, making this such a fantastic scale and very simple to learn. The next note is the 1st fret on string 2. We play that with the first finger. First fret, first finger. We're then gonna play that 3rd fret again, and this is why I encourage it to be with the 3rd finger, 3rd fret, 3rd finger. It's exactly the same as that on string one. 1st fret, 1st finger. 3rd fret. Third finger. That takes us from the C note at the open 3rd string to the C note, which is the note we know that we play when we play a C chord. C to C. It's important that we can play these notes going up as well as coming down. Coming down tends to be a little bit harder for people. But this is the thing with the musical alphabet and our musical ABC's, is that we need to learn it both forwards and backwards. I don't think I can say the alphabet backwards, so that just gives you an example of how, how crazy it is to kind of come backwards down these. But that's what we do in music, we go forwards and backwards throughout a set of notes. In reverse, so from high to low. That scale becomes this. Then again, it's 3rd finger to 1st finger. On strings 1 and 2, and then 3rd finger to open. 31313 open. Now we want to check that we're doing all the same good things that we learned when we looked at that finger exercise at level one in the first batch of lessons. Where we hold the finger down and then we place the next finger down and lift the third finger in this case off at the same time. It's like the passing the baton in a relay race. We don't want them both holding onto the baton and we don't want to drop the baton either. Pass it on. 3rd finger here when we go across the screen, as soon as that pressure goes down, we're lifting off the pressure from the 1st finger. Same thing when we're going up. Open 3rd. Pass that baton Don't drop it, don't leave our fingers off like this. And then when we're ready, come back down. At this stage, I want you to take this at your own pace. There is no goal tempo, you're just trying to make sure that you're playing the notes correctly. Play those notes in that order when we're going up and when we're coming back down. However, I can guarantee you're going to get to play this far better and far quicker. You're gonna make this sound great, if we can make it sound musical, if we can make it sound like a riff. A riff is a short repetitive sequence of notes that is by definition, super recognisable. An example of a musical riff would be the opening part of Sweet Child O Mine. Uh, as soon as you hear those first few notes, it repeats, but we recognise it instantly as that song, sweet child of mine. Uh, we're gonna do a similar thing here but we're gonna come up with our own. All we're gonna do is take this scale, this set of notes, start with the open 3 string, go to the highest note that we played in our scale, and then come back down. That's all we're gonna do. But when I play it to a rhythm, when I play it like this. Suddenly just sounds cooler, right? Am I being crazy? Am I mad? Probably. But I think that sounds cooler. We're literally playing the same notes in the same order but we're going from the lowest note to the highest note to start with and then coming back down. Now I played it fast then, I just wanted to give you some inspiration. We don't need to play it that fast. You choose the tempo. I just want you to play these notes ringing out great. Go to the highest note. And then back down. We're gonna make the 1st 1 and the 2nd 1 longer. Use your thumb, use your fingers, just try and get these notes to sound correct and as good as you can possibly make them play in whatever way possible. Final time. Once you can do that, repeat it, that's what all the best riffs do, that's what all the best songs do, they have a lot of repetition in them. Get used to that now and you'll be absolutely loving playing some ukulele. Uh, that's it for this video, I will see you in the next one. Have fun playing your first scale and your first riff.