Uke and Me: Why I Picked Up the Ukulele (for the Second Time)

A story of making music on a tiny instrument.

I have always been a bit musically inclined. When I was very small, I would play around on our family’s piano, plinking out tunes I’d heard. My parents were thrilled that I took an interest in the piano — neither of them played, the piano had just come with the house. I think they were just happy it would get some use.

They wound up investing in piano lessons for me in grade and middle school. I threw myself into them for a bit, then grew tired of it. I didn’t have the discipline to practice regularly, which often led to me doing all of my practice for the week in the hour before my lesson. After a while, I dropped out of the lessons, not wanting to invest that much of my free time into something I didn’t really enjoy anymore.

Part of my frustration was that I wasn’t picking it up as quickly as I liked. I have a bit of a natural talent for making music — I pick up the basics of instruments fairly quickly, and can jump to an intermediate level in a fairly short amount of time. My main problem is that I don’t have the patience to practice regularly, which prevents me from getting past that level.

I would periodically play the piano throughout most of the rest of my teens and 20s, spending some time plunking around on it a couple of times a year. I had a repertoire of songs that I knew by heart and retained my skills fairly well, so I never got bad at it, but I didn’t care to practice to get better.

In middle school, we were introduced to band class, and I decided to pick up the trumpet. As with the piano, I grasped the basics fairly quickly and moved up to an intermediate level after a short time, but I never cared to practice to get beyond that point. As such, I never made it beyond second seat in middle and high school band class. After I got transferred out of my public school, I stopped playing and never really picked it up again.

Fast forward to my early 30s. Some friends were planning to pick up the ukulele to practice a new hobby together (and also as an excuse to socialize more often).e While it started as a trio of my female friends (they wanted to form a group called the Ukeladies), I was happy to join in and try a new instrument.

As it went, I started going to weekly practice sessions with several friends. There wound up being four of us — two women, one other guy, and myself. A fifth person had intended to join, but flaked out constantly and eventually just decided to not do it after all.

Led by my friend Mo, we sat around her living room, watching lessons on YouTube and learning music that she had printed for us. It was fun, and as with my previous two instruments, I picked it up fairly quickly. Also like my previous two instruments, I didn’t practice much outside of the weekly gatherings.

It’s not that I didn’t want to. Part of the reason was not wanting to bother my partner with my (sometimes discordant) strumming. She, of course, had no problem with me practicing if I wanted to, I was just being a bit obtuse in thinking I was a bother to her.

Still, the regular jam sessions helped keep me honest, and I even managed to sneak in practice outside of them from time to time. I started getting better, and for a while, I felt like I was actually making progress.

At the time, I had been growing my hair out for a while, and I decided to go to a convention dressed as a young Greg Universe from the show Steven Universe, ukulele in tow. Unfortunately, that wound up being a very stressful time in my life, and I wound up dropping out at the last minute due to stress and anxiety. Not long after that, the weekly jam sessions broke up and I stopped playing.

This was several years ago, and it occurred during a terrible time in my life where I was in the process of breaking contact with my family. I didn’t have the energy to invest in a time-intensive hobby like an instrument. Still, I enjoyed the thought of playing again at some point. I imagined myself learning a bunch of contemporary songs, posting them on YouTube or something, and just enjoying myself.

Fast forward to a few months ago. I started playing a new RPG session with some friends, set in a post-apocalyptic world. My character was a literal angel of healing, having been abandoned by the creator and the celestial chorus. His friend, a literal demon, was similarly abandoned by demonkind and had dedicated his life in the post-apocalypse to finding my character.

(They’re modeled strongly on Aziraphale and Crowley from Good Omens because we’re nerdy fanboys.)

Early into the character’s life, I decided that, as a quirky hobby in his previous life, he played the ukulele. Not well — he is an angel of healing, after all, not an angel of music — but he tries, and it was a fun pastime for him pre-apocalypse. So, I told our GM that my character was in search of a ukulele in-game.

Outside of the game, I told the GM that, should my character be provided with a ukulele, I would post recordings of myself performing songs for the group. I had been itching to pick up my uke again, and this felt like a good excuse.

In the intervening years since I put it down, I’ve learned a lot about what hobbies are supposed to be. I learned that I don’t have to be fantastic at my hobbies, I just have to have fun with them. So, I decided that I’m going to play my uke again and just…not worry about getting better. I’m going to learn whatever songs I want, play them as best as I can, and just enjoy the act of playing.

And, so far, it’s been fun. I started playing again, and I’ve already learned a new song that I will be performing for my group at some point. I seem to have kept most of the skills that I picked up during my first run with it, so I didn’t lose too much ground in the few years that I haven’t been playing.

I get my practice in when I can — usually once or twice a week when I’ve got a free minute and won’t be bothering my partner. She has insisted that I can play whenever I want and she’ll be fine, but my ingrained politeness prevents me from fully believing her.

I’m going to keep playing as long as I feel like it, and just play for the fun of it. I suspect that I will get better as time goes on, and though I’ll probably never be fantastic, that’s not the point. I started playing it again because I wanted to do something fun for myself, and music is kind of important to me. So, I’ll keep playing as long as it’s still fun. No pressure to be better or practice constantly, no push to perform or monetize it or make it into a side-hustle. Just me and my uke, playing whatever I want, whenever I want, just for me.

I might perform for my partner from time to time, though. There’s something nice about learning a love song for her to remind her how much I love her.

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