In this ukulele tutorial we're going to go over the five most common mistakes that ukulele players make. Hi I'm Terry and here at ukulele depros I'm dedicated to helping you become a better ukulele player. If you haven't done so already subscribe to the channel so you can stay up to date with all the lessons and tutorials. After teaching for years and just hundreds, probably thousands of students, I see the same mistakes over and over again and I wanted to go over those so I broke them down into five simple steps. First one, stiff wrist and what I'm saying that what I'm referring to is the wrist of the strumming hand and what happens is a lot of times I see students doing this. When it should be this and what that is is we got to really loosen up the wrist here. If it's stiff meaning kind of locked you end up strumming more from the elbow and it creates a harsh sound and I'm really not overexaggerating that that's what I hear a lot of students sound like. So instead what you got to do is you got to loosen up and a lot of it come from almost like a rotating motion here of the wrist and by the way I'm just playing a a chord for this and so when you loosen up and lighten up a little bit you get that nice sound it's smooth it's soft and especially when you start going faster you're going to be able to do it. All right number two lazy fingers and when I say lazy fingers I'm talking about the fingers that go to where we play our chords and when I refer to those lazy fingers is when you get this and notice what's happening here is instead of playing on the finger tips like you should we're playing on the finger pads and so what happens is you don't get very clear chords because your fingers are drooping over and hitting other strings. So now in order to play on our finger tips the easiest thing to do is just think about is rounding these knuckles so every knuckle is bent and that's going to force you to play right on the finger tip and now when you play this each finger doesn't droop down and hit the other strings right and so we get lazy like I mentioned that was we can't even play good sounding chords because these fingers are hitting different strings but now when we curve our fingers play on our fingertips we got nice clean chords. The third most common problem most ukulele players make is they're sitting position. This is really bad because people sit in all kinds of different chairs they practice sitting on their couch and so I want to help you out with that. Basically what I like to do is I like to use a strap and the reason why I like to use a strap is because one it carries the weight of the ukulele so now you don't have to use your hand to hold up the ukulele. Now I know straps aren't always common with ukulele players sometimes they like to use their arm to hold it up and that's okay but you still want to pay attention to the technique because even the greats that use their arm they still have the ukulele in a nice plain position. Generally what's going to happen is you're going to have the neck at a 45 degree angle. This is going to help with your wrist because it's going to put it at a nice straight angle right so if we notice when I'm playing my wrist is straight here. When I have a bad position like how about this one sitting on the couch watching TV right we're all guilty of that or what happens if I just drop the neck down like that right it's going to put my wrist now notice my wrist now is in a real bad angle here and that's going to cause some injuries. So again I like to use a strap try to get it in a nice 45 degree angle take the pressure off your hand so now no matter if you're strumming or you're playing single notes everything's in a nice position. The fourth mistake is you don't learn the essentials. Now what are the essentials? The essentials are things like understanding how to count time signatures 4 4 3 4 6 8 can you at least play in those? How about even understanding what a quarter note is an eighth note a half note a whole note a sixteenth note or what rest star. These are things that a lot of us overlook because we're so into just learning a few chords and learning some songs but by skipping this we're really missing out on becoming a much better musician. So you want to get things now like study your key signatures study some music theory study your scales and even why they are scales and study your chords why what makes up a C major chord study this stuff it will help you become a much better player once you understand the instrument and thus during that time you're also going to be learning the neck of the ukulele so learn all your essentials. The fifth most common mistake most ukulele players make is daily practice. We get real excited when we first get our instrument we play it all the time and then what happens we get busy maybe we put it down a day maybe as two days or three days the way you're going to improve on ukulele is by that daily practice by picking it up every single day. Now I'm not going to say if you just play five minutes a day you're going to become a great ukulele player but I'll tell you this I'd rather you play five minutes a day rather than one day a week for 30 minutes because music and instrument you're going to see a very slow growth as you improve and so it only comes by that daily practice that daily discipline of picking it up and playing strumming your chords or playing your scales you know or playing your favorite song that's where you're really going to see a lot of progress so don't even let one day go by plus these things are so small that they're easy to travel with so even if you're going somewhere you can just throw this in you gig bag and take your ukulele with you so those are the five most common mistakes that most ukulele players make let's review them stiff wrist lazy fingers bad posture not knowing the essentials and not daily practice. 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