You’ve heard it many times: “It’s not in good form to use a pick for a ukulele.” Well, here’s my awful disclosure: I use a pick. And you know why? Because it does sound better, as least for a beginner like myself. It allows me to strum loud, fast, and consistent. If you look at YouTube videos, you’ll see that a lot of semipros also use picks. I haven’t asked them, but I presume it is also because it does sound better. Picks are pretty much a must for steel strings, and they are quite helpful on plastic strings. But you’ve got to pick the right pick. Read More
Month: May 2018
Find more ukulele chords
A year and a half after I took up the ukulele, I’m calling myself an intermediate player. Now, an intermediate should be able to do a little more than strum a few open chords with a felt pick, so here’s a chart that is helping me to find chords up the neck (I still strum with a pick ;-). Hopefully you’ll find it useful too. Read More
PassLok and EFail
This May 14th, a group of German security researchers revealed EFail, a successful attack against PGP (short for Pretty Good Privacy), and S/MIME, the leading methods for end-to-end encrypted email nowadays. You can read their shorter post here, and their full paper here. I’ve contacted a number of people who wrote about it to tell them about PassLok and its immunity to the EFail attack. This post adds more details to what you may shortly found printed elsewhere. Read More
Cheapest MIDI guitar
For quite a while, I’ve been interested in making a guitar or ukulele sound like other instruments. The way a guitar sounds when strummed appeals to me, since it blends so well with singing to make a song, but I get bored quickly with things always sounding the same. This is while I’ve built a number of ukuleles in the last few months and my collection now counts some 15 units. There is this device called “MIDI guitar controller” that you play like a guitar but can sound like anything else, since what it does is get real-time note information from your performance, which can then be fed to a hardware or software instrument. Most MIDI guitars, however, are either discontinued or very expensive. I was resigned to never using one until I ran into the “Rock Band 3 Fender Mustang guitar controller pro” (whew!), which is now selling (new) for a tad over $50. This article expounds how this relatively cheap device compares with much more expensive devices. Read More
At last! A MIDI ukulele
There are a number of MIDI-enabled guitars out there, but did you know now there is also a MIDI ukulele? Kudos to Maker Hart for their courage in developing the DU-one and EU-one instruments. They were kind enough to send me a free DU-one so I could write this review. Short version of this rather long article: it takes a lot of effort and frustration to get it to work, but in the end it is all worth it. Read More