The Austin Ukulele Society warmly welcomed over 100 players from around the globe to our quarterly virtual meeting on September 22. We truly enjoy these opportunities to spend time with our friends near and far, so thank you for making time to join in. For our featured song, we revisited a popular AUS song from three years ago: The Beatles’ Ringo Starr-penned delightful tune, “Octopus’s Garden.” We’ve all wanted to be somewhere we weren’t at some point, so we can relate to Ringo’s sentiments in this cheerful lament.  💓

Bob started the workshop with some local uke news and our warm up song, Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds.” He then demonstrated his arrangement of “Octopus’s Garden.” Bob led us through many helpful exercises, to get comfortable with the chords (even the Bb!) and the strum patterns, as well as the picking options. He gave us some great tips on vocal harmony options, too. We put the song together and played it through a couple of times, and it sounded terrific! Before we finished up our practice for the evening, we played our closing song – Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again.”

You can download the lyrics, chords, and tab for “Octopus’s Garden,” or download a copy of the presentation and instruction guide, including exercises and drills. You can also watch a replay of the June 23 live stream. Watch the entire show or jump to the part you most want to see!

As always, we thank Jen Richardson for moderating the chat and helping get questions addressed in real time and to Lyda Guz for her fantastic projectionist skills.

We owe much gratitude to Marty Porter and Paul Butler for putting together our collaborative videos, and we enjoyed watching the most recent effort, Jimmy Buffet’s “Margaritaville” together, before saying good night. Check it out:

Thank you for joining us, sending in your selfies, and staying connected!

We’ll see you on December 15 for our festive, holiday repertoire strum and sing-a-long! Stay in touch, keep strumming, and keep an eye on the Austin Ukulele Society’s YouTube channel. 🙂

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

Contact Us if you have any questions or would like to be added to our mailing list!

Ukulele Society T-shirts!
As you may know, we create a new t-shirt every fall. Celebrating our global AUS community, we are thrilled to unveil our latest edition t-shirt, “Ukulele Around the World,” designed by the talented Lyda Guz!

The shirts are silk screened here in Austin at a fantastic locally-owned print shop and are available for purchase via mail order. The new “Ukulele Around the World” design, “10th Anniversary,” Mermaid, Cowboy,” and “Austin Lasso” shirts are $20 – all other styles are $15. Please drop us a line if you’d like to purchase a shirt (or two or three). 🙂 At this time, we can only ship orders within the U.S.