Monday, August 4, 2008

New Ukulele Club

Here's a shameless plug for a new ukulele club in North East England, called the Stockton to Darlington Ukulele Express it started on 24th July 2008 which I attended. Only five of us initially, but I'm sure it will grow.

Here's the info :-
The Stockton to Darlington Ukulele Express is a Ukulele club in the North East of England for Ukulele players of all abilities.

The venue is upstairs at the Darlington Railway Institute Club in Darlington, postcode DL1 2PP (click for google map), across Whessoe Rd is B&Q.

The meetings are currently held every three to four weeks. Check our Google group for the date of the next meeting http://groups.google.co.uk/group/ukulele-express.

Contact Simon Brown for further details.

Sunday, March 2, 2008

Xaphoon Connect

My first post of 2008 and its not even about ukulele's ;)

I recently stumbled across the Xaphoon . A Xaphoon looks a little like recorder but uses a reed on the mouthpiece. The sound is described as somewhere between a tenor saxophone and a clarinet. Here's a couple of youtube links :-
Summertime
How a Xaphoon is made

What appeals to me about it is similar to why the ukulele appeals to me, its small, portable and relatively inexpensive and most importantly it looks to be a whole lot of fun. I may add that I don't have one of these yet, but I'm seriously thinking about it ;) You see my singing stinks and I'm thinking that this instrument will compliment my ukulele playing, of course I'll have to record multiple tracks, but that will be fun also.

The main reason to this post is to advertise a new forum I've set up for sharing information on the Xaphoon, I couldn't find any myself and I know how valuable such forums have been to me in learning the ukulele. The new forum is called Xaphoon Connect http://xaphoonconnect.x.am if you have anything to add please go and check it out, it needs posts :)

Just a quick edit. I've disabled Xaphoon Connect because the official forum at Xaphoon.com has now come back online and added a number of categories. Having another forum that was so similar would have been just confusing :)