The Austin Ukulele Society hosted it’s first ever fully virtual monthly meeting this April, due to widespread shelter-in-place orders. While Austin-area AUS members and visitors love meeting in person to learn, strum, and record a song together, there are silver linings to any challenging situation – and we are so glad that a big silver lining for us was sharing a lovely ninety minutes or so, with ukulele players from five continents! Friends joined us from nearly half of the states in the U.S., and from Canada, Brazil, Australia, Singapore, Scotland, Spain, England, Germany, Switzerland, and New Zealand – and more! 🙂

It was truly lovely to have over 400 ukulele players, sheltering-in-place, while playing and singing three wonderful songs together. We owe a huge thanks to Lyda Guz, for her timely presentation projection skills, and to Jen Richardson for live commenting/responding to all that joined in.

 
Our first virtual meeting was the perfect occasion to learn one of the Beatles’ most inspiring tunes, the 1970 hit “Let It Be.” Bob kicked off our meeting as we usually do, with some introductions – and we’re glad so many attendees made use of the Live Chat to chime in and say where they were tuning in from, greet one another, and ask questions. We warmed up with Bob Marley’s wonderfully optimistic “Three Little Birds” before Bob G. gave us a lovely demo performance of his arrangement of the Beatles’ “Let It Be”. He then took us through some helpful exercises to teach the strum style, chord progressions, and more, before we put the song together and played it through a couple of times. Afterward, we wrapped up our virtual meeting with our favorite closing song, Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again.”

To play along with us, you can download the lyrics and chords for our arrangement of “Let It Be” or download a copy of the presentation and instruction guide for all to follow along, including exercises and drills). You can watch a replay of the broadcast:

Our heartfelt thanks go out to the many folks who sent in or shared photos of themselves during the live event!! 🙂

 
If we’re still sheltering in mid-May, we’ll meet again via our YouTube channel Thursday, May 14. We hope you’ll join us! Stay safe and keep strumming the magical 4-string instrument that fosters our beautiful music community. 🙂

For more downloadable music, visit our Ukulele Music Library. For more Austin Ukulele Society videos, check out our YouTube Channel.

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