You are on your way to be good or even great Ukulele player, but first of all after you did all previous preparations there is one more, very important one!  You need to know to to Hold Ukulele correctly to make most out of it.

Think of it as if it was your pet or best friend. You need to teach yourself to be as much gentle with your instrument as possible, respect it, and then you will understand it. So there are few trick on what you should do with your hands.

Hand Caring

First of all, the hands should always be clean before playing. Don’t be lazy, wash your hands before taking Ukulele in your hand. That way, the instrument will be cleaner and the strings will serve you longer.

The fingernails on the left hand should be cut, otherwise, you’ll have a hard time holding a chord together. On the other hand (literally, the right hand), the nails are often grown to replace the pick. But that’s up to you to decide.

Hand Placement:

Left Hand

In order to play for a long time and not get weary, it’s important for the hand to be relaxed as much as possible. Musicians even have a term for that – silk hands. It’s also important for a thumb to be in the middle of the neck, so that the other fingers could easily reach the strings and the hand itself wouldn’t get too tired.

Right hand

Right hand should also be as relaxed as possible! No need to pluck the strings, especially when learning, go slow and steady!

As for the hand placement, the thumb holds the upper string. As Ukulele does not have any bass strings, we will use the upper one the anyway we want! The rest of the fingers are placed on the other strings.

P.S.

You’ve probably seen some YouTube videos where some people place their fingers incorrectly. The deal is, most of them are self-taught and they’ve had no idea as to how to place their fingers. Please don’t repeat their mistakes, as it’s hard to relearn and the wrong finger placement can substantially worsen your playing quality! Hold Ukulele Correctly!