On a warm Thursday evening, 130+ ukulele players got together for a wonderful evening of learning, singing and strumming. We were thrilled to have many local regulars and plenty of first-timers, including visitors from Iowa, Minnesota and Venezuela. As usual, we kicked off our evening with introductions and local ukulele event news, before launching into our ever-optimistic warm-up song, “Three Little Birds.”

The Beatles have a fantastic array of songs, many of which are well suited to ukulele covers and big group play-alongs. So it’s no wonder that every couple of years we find ourselves revisiting The Beatles’ catalog and choosing one of their well-loved tunes for our featured song. For our May song, we learned “Across the Universe,” from their last studio album, Let It Be, in 1970.

Bob shared an overview of his arrangement of “Across the Universe,” before performing a lovely demonstration of it. With Bob’s terrific guidance, we enjoyed practicing the chord progressions, strum styles, finger-picking and harmonizing options. Then we put the song together and played it through a couple of times, getting better with each try!

We took a break to enjoy terrific open mic performances by Kelly, Jack, Spencer and Jay. We’re always so impressed by the array of talent shared during this portion of our evening!

Afterward, we practiced “Across the Universe” a couple of more times and recorded it for you to enjoy and play along with. Look for it soon on our YouTube channel. We hope you’ll enjoy our video performance as much as we enjoyed making it.  🙂

To play along with us, you can download the lyrics and chords for our arrangement of “Across the Universe” or download a copy of the presentation and instruction guide (what we project on the screen for all to follow along, including exercises and drills).

We are thankful to Aaron Lewis for joining us on bass and to our amazing volunteers who do so much to make the evening successful. Your support is greatly appreciated!

Looking forward to seeing you at our next in-person meeting, Thursday, June 8! Until then, keep strummin’! 🙂

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

We appreciate your support and interest. If you’d like to make a donation to the Austin Ukulele Society (a 501(c)(3) organization), visit our Square Donation site. If you would like to be added to our mailing list, please fill out our this short sign-up form. For any other inquiries, please contact us or shoot us an email if you have previous correspondence with us.

Ukulele Society T-shirts!
We are proud to unveil our latest shirt, new for 2022: the “AUS Classic Ukulele,” design, hot off the presses! All of our shirts are thoughtfully 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. The new “AUS Classic Ukulele” design, “Ukulele Around the World,” “10th Anniversary,” Mermaid, Cowboy,” “Austin Lasso” and other shirts are $25. We also have vinyl decals with the AUS logo for $1 each. We can accept cash or a check made out to Austin Ukulele Society; you can also make payment via Venmo or PayPal. 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.