Breaking out of the Island (Strum) ukulele course
August 2025
What is it?
A 5 week intensive video course that will teach you the building blocks behind all strumming patterns, how to build your own and teach you about fundamental rhythm.
Who is it for?
It's for anyone stuck on playing the same strumming pattern to every song and wants to develop their rhythm and create their own strumming patterns!
What is the outcome?
You'll have a good understanding of how rhythm works within music, therefore being able to create your own strumming patterns and apply this to whatever song you like.
Lesson breakdown:
Week 1 : Strumming technique - we talk about getting the best tone out of your uke, how to add accent strums and chucks for bigger dynamics to our playing without making anything else any more complicated.
Week 2 : Strumming maths - we study the art of music is maths, making sure our understanding of how strum quarter notes vs eight notes is solid. We’ll use these two note combos to instantly start writing and improvising new patterns.
Week 3 : Playing less - we talk about how to create any complex strumming pattern simply by doing less with our strumming and not more. Plenty of exercises to help build our rhythm and to help you create more complex strumming patterns.
Week 4: Finding the groove - we talk about the importance of using our ears to listen to the music we’re imitating and how to use this to help us create a strumming pattern that sounds like the song.
Week 5: Exercising in real life - for the final lesson we’ll go through the steps you need to be creating and playing your own patterns, and recap everything we’ve done and make sure you can take this on your own by working through some examples together.
This course was held live on Zoom this year, you will receive the recordings from these sessions along with all the material.