Ukulele Practice Tips: Set Goals for Your Playing

Learning to play the ukulele, like learning any instrument, is a marathon rather than a sprint. No matter how much practice you do in the short term, it is long term dedication that will determine how well you play. But, how do you keep up your level of motivation in the long term? Setting goals for yourself is a great way to keep yourself motivated.

But it also does more than this. It allows you to monitor how your playing is improving. It is sometimes hard to recognise when we are improving. If you don't realise that you are improving, you may start to lose your motivation. Keeping track of your goals and when you reach them will reassure you that your playing is getting better and that the practicing you are doing does pay off.

Setting Speed Goals

Find, or invent, as short practice exercise. This could be a scale, a sequence of chords or a musical phrase. Set a metronome at a slow speed - slow enough that you can play it comfortably without making any mistakes. Once you've found that speed, turn the metronome up very slightly. Keep doing this until mistakes start to creep in. As soon as you start making mistakes, make a note of that speed. This is your new goal. Go back down slightly (to a speed at which you can play without making mistakes) and practice the phrase over and over. This will get your fingers used to making these certain movements.

Eventually, making these moves will become second nature. After practicing like this for a few days. Go back to the slightly higher speed. Can you play it at this speed now? If you can, keep increasing the speed again until mistakes start to creep in again. The big advantage of keeping track of how fast you can play is that it is very easy to measure. On the down side, playing the same exercise over and over again can become a little boring.

Setting Repertoire Goals

Adding new songs and tunes to your repertoire is a much more fun way of practicing. However, since it is less vigorous, it is not always as effective as speed practice. It is also much harder to gauge how well your playing along as there isn't any concrete measurement.

Ideally, your practice should be well balanced between both repertoire goals and speed goals to make sure that it doesn't become too boring.