Category: Musicology

  • Four-alarm pentatonic ukulele chili

    My #uke4geeks talk at South By was so hot it set off a false alarm. We persevered, and prevailed, a small band of die-hards, many of whom brought their own axes (next time we set it up as a hootenanny?), and here are the slides I spoke to. I’m already revising them based on flow…

  • Coming this Friday to SXSW: "Ukulele for Geeks: Secrets of the Pentatonic Scales"

    “At first glance the fretboard of a ukulele (or guitar) looks incomprehensible, but with the magic of pentatonic scales – ancient, nearly universal 5-note patterns, you can “crack the code” and hack the fretboard and start jamming along with your favorite tunes or musician friends in no time. “You don’t need to know the names…

  • A book for those who got in the bus in the '80s

    … As we know, it couldn’t last. It was a bubble of sorts, but its surface tension held for a crucial stretch of years, long enough to sustain this pocket of the counterculture until reinforcements could arrive, tune up, plug in, and rock out….

  • Video of Uke for Geeks talk at Ignite Sydney

    A month or so ago I posted my slides and some photos from my Ignite Sydney talk. Today I just noticed that the video was up on YouTube (yays). Unfortunately, there’s a person’s head obscuring the view of the ukulele for most of my talk, and I kind of start ignoring the slides after a…

  • Ukulele for Geeks, live in Tokyo

    (A few snaps of my talk from the Tokyo 2.0 PechaKucha night the other evening.)

  • Ukulele for geeks: secrets of the pentatonic scales

    My Ignite Sydney talk last night was fun (for me, at least). Here are my slides: Ukulele For Geeks: Secrets of the Pentatonic ScalesView more presentations from Christian Crumlish. Here are a few audience shots. The first is from a warmup: This one is from the actual talk: Dag, my chrome dome has almost completely…