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Ukuleles come in multiple shapes and sizes. I have a soprano ukulele, which is the highest pitched and therefore the smallest size. There are also concert ukuleles, which are bigger than soprano ukuleles, and tenor ukuleles, which are even bigger than concert ukuleles. Finally, there are baritone ukuleles, which are very large and the lowest-pitched. After having played the soprano ukulele for a long time, with its very small fret spacing and size, I came across a tenor ukulele owned by a friend of mine. It was much larger, and I was very tempted  to try it out. As I expected, I was able to play it successfully and without much trouble even with the larger fret sizing than I was used to. My previous experience on the soprano ukulele was extremely similar to the playing of a tenor ukulele, therefore positive transfer of learning occurred. This is when a previous experience has a beneficial effect on the learning of a new performance.

I also have a friend who is very talented in playing both the ukulele and the guitar. These are similar instruments, however they have key differences. Ukuleles have only four strings while guitars have six. Ukuleles and guitars are also tuned completely differently. My friend learned to play the ukulele before she learned to play the guitar. I asked her if she believed that experience helped her when she picked up the guitar. Her answer was that it definitely did. Although the chords and tuning are different, she believes that strumming is an integral part of playing both instruments. Because she had mastered this while learning to play the ukulele, she was able to transfer this skill to the guitar. While it was still very hard to learn to play the guitar, she believes it would have been even harder without her previous experience  with the ukulele. This is another example of positive transfer of learning. Below is how I picture my friend masterfully playing the guitar.

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Attentional focus, and its four quadrants, are extremely applicable in the playing of the ukulele and any musical instrument. When I play the ukulele, I am in the narrow external quadrant. I am performing an external action, but I am heavily focusing only on what I am doing. However, advanced ukulele players that play for audiences are in this quadrant as well as the broad external quadrant. They have to focus on playing the right notes and strumming right as well as looking at a large group of people and appealing as a performer to them.

Interference plays a large part in why I do much better playing for myself than for other people. When trying to perform for others, I am trying to play the ukulele correctly, sing, and appeal to my audience. Typically, when multiple tasks are performed simultaneously, one of them suffers. From experience, it would be appealing to the audience for me. I must focus very hard on my actual playing. However, an expert performer can get really good at this, so that both tasks become almost autonomous. Therefore, both can be performed well at once. Below is an example of an expert doing this.

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As explained previously, strumming is one of the hardest parts of learning to play the ukulele. If the performer's strumming pattern is off, the whole song sounds wrong. From my experience, learning to strum has a lot to do with memory. The memory system used changes from declarative to procedural as one becomes better at playing the instrument. Declarative memory is the memory system that contains our knowledge of facts and events that we can easily explain out loud to others. As a novice ukulele player, I would say strumming patterns out loud to myself in order to remember what to do. Using the words "up" and "down", I practiced many common strumming patterns. The way this is explained to novice players is exemplified with the picture attached below. Eventually, my knowledge of these patterns switched to my procedural memory system. Procedural memory is where information for skills is stored. As one becomes more advanced at a certain skill, it becomes more automatic and therefore harder to explain in words. Today, I can pick up a strumming pattern for a song fairly easily. However, I would find it much more difficult to put into words exactly what my hands are doing in order to produce it.

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One of the harder parts about playing the ukulele, the guitar, or any number of instruments is coordinating one's hand movements. In order to play the ukulele, one's right hand plays out the strumming pattern or picks at certain strings on the interment while the left hand switches from one stand-still hand position to another. To better exemplify this, I have attached a video of myself playing the ukulele below. This video clearly shows the bimanual coordination that is necessary to successfully play the ukulele. Specifically, it is an example of asymmetrical bimanual coordination.

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In the winter of 8th grade, I received a gift from my parents that I had been wanting for a long time. A ukulele! I had loved to sing for years, and I imagined being able to accompany myself would be an amazing feat. The endless possibilities of songs I could both sing and play excited me beyond belief.  That night, I immediately began to try to play. I chose a song (La Vie En Rose) and decided to learn it.

Of course, I quickly realized that learning to play a musical instrument was not as easy as I had imagined. Once this realization set in, I began to put in real work to truly learn to play. This is where, looking back, I now see that I followed Gentile's Two Stage Model of Learning in order to successfully learn how to play.

Gentile's 1st Stage: getting the idea of the movement. This stage focuses on learning the correct movement patterns in order to be successful at a motor task. The learner goes through many different strategies, utilizing trial and error as they go. This is exactly what I did to learn to play the ukulele. I would search up a song, and every time I came across a chord I didn't know how to play (which was almost every time), I looked it up and practiced that one chord. Then I would try to add it back to the entire song's chord sequence. Learning to strum was equally as hard. I would watch videos explaining strum patterns, but I would also just choose a random pattern until it "felt right".

Gentile's 2nd Stage: fixation and diversification. This stage has two subparts. Fixation focuses on being able to consistently utilize correct movement patterns. After learning what works in the first stage, the learner begins to use successful movement patterns without thinking too much about it. They can perform the action consistently and automatically. I came to this stage in my learning process a couple months after receiving the ukulele from my parents. I could now recognize most chords I came across in a song and flawlessly switch from chord to chord. I also had stopped really thinking about strumming patterns. If I knew the song I was trying to play, the strumming pattern would come naturally.  The diversification stage comes after this, and focuses on modifying one's movement patterns in accordance with the environment around them. I believe I am starting to be in this stage of learning now. I can now try some picking patterns (more complex than simply playing a chord) if the song calls  for it. I have attached an example as a video below.