Sunday 19 March 2017

Wow, I do seem to have forgotten this site!

So much to do and so little time; so what has kept me away? Well work and family life of course, but what do I do with my spare time? Let me see ...

I get a few evenings a week to myself nowadays and one or two of these are available for music. This is almost exclusively covered by the ukulele at the moment. I don't think I have picked up a guitar in ages. Oh, except for one recording I made recently. I wanted to do a short instrumental lead-in and the ukulele simply does not have enough sustain, even when amplified to make it sound as I wanted it. So, I had to  press an acoustic guitar into use - just for a couple of bars though.

This was a cover of the song made popular by Josh Grobban, You raise me up. Lots of people have recorded it since then and why not it is a great melody.

Listen to Raise Me Up on "YouListen" (Not a site I would recommend because of extensive nag screens and advertising although it pushes itself as a fee site. But it is convenient so as not to use up too much of the free time I use on "SoundCloud".)

I hope to put up a better link soon.

The ukulele group, UkuleleCentral UK has gone from strength to strength and we have had a succession of gigs, which keep us busy. This photo shows the group at our second birthday extravaganza that we held in support of a cancer charity, Get Ahead, and for the second time we raised over £1000 for this very special organisation.



That's me on the extreme right. We vary the number of players at our gigs depending upon time (some of us still work) and place/occasion. For example this net photo shows us at a local school fete.


This time I have pointed myself out with the red arrow. And just one more photo set for this post .... This was from a day long gig on the Severn Valley Railway. We split our numbers into two and rode up and down the line from Bridgenorth to Kidderminster and played at stations along the way. And gave impromptu performances on the trains between the stations. As a final act, we met up at the recently improved visitor centre and played through our set as a single band. A lot of fun was had by all of us and some of the paying travellers as well.


Final act in the visitor centre


in the guard's van and one of our more sophisticated fans on the day


The first set of the day at Kidderminster

OK I believe that is enough for this post, don't want to bore you too much. I will say however that most places we visit for a gig often lead to repeat bookings, We will play at anywhere, anytime withing reason. But being a community group rather than a "band" we do need to be able to get enough volunteers to play at some times of the week/day. Certainly, we expect this trip on the railway to be repeated.


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