Latest news from Luminate + Round Up 13 October

Guess whose photo features in the latest Luminate News letter? Click here for the answer. Good one! 🙂

We had another very busy class this week. We welcomed Ray to our class as he has agreed to play his bass guitar for us on Saturday @ Monifieth Cabin. He was thrown in at the deep end and coped wonderfully well with the songs we practised. We should have 20/21 people playing as well as Ray. Please remember to bring along our updated playlist (Click Monifieth Fund-raiser Playlist 31 October if you don’t have it) and remember to wear your Hawaiian shirts! The concert is from 2 – 4pm with a break in the middle. The full address is on the Events tab if you need it.

Songs we practised include:

• Dirty Old Town – Dee Ukes version
• Sunny Afternoon – Dee Ukes version – Ray to introduce
• Wooden Heart 
• Can’t Help Falling In Love
• I Wanna be Like You
• Leaving on a Jet Plane
• Last Thing On My Mind in the key of C – we tried it in another key and decided C is better. – Please note that Dee Ukes version is slightly different from the Perth version
• Whiskey in the Jar – Dee Ukes version
• Rock Around the Clock – Dee Ukes version
• Bring Me Sunshine

All of the above are available on the website.

Other items discussed at the start of the class include:

Concert @ St Margaret’s Residential Home on Monday 2nd November from 2-3pm. A small group of people has volunteered to play as space is restricted. The full address and map is on our Events tab.

We have been invited to play as part of the entertainment at St Andrew’s Ceilidh at Holy Trinity Church, High Street, Monifieth on Friday 27th November. The ceilidh starts at 7.30. I will ask for volunteers next week.

Click U3A Newsletter October 2015 if you haven’t seen the newsletter from John Mooney. Please note there are still places left for the Christmas lunch at the Woodlands on Monday 14th December at 12.30 for 12.45pm start.

We have been invited to join Happy Ukes for tea @ the Decades Bar in Ward Road on Tuesday 8th December at 6pm. This would be followed by an evening of fun and music. More details are to follow.

Click Celtic Connections if you wish to book a place on Finlay Allison’s Ukulele workshop weekend which takes place on 23/24 January 2016. The venue is Glasgow Royal Concert hall.

Looking forward to seeing you on Saturday if you are coming along to the Cabin. Should be a good one! 🙂

 

Tayside Silver Strummers in Action

Here are the first two videos of Tayside Silver Strummers in action at the Space on Saturday 24th October. Many thanks to Alan McC’s wife Joan for taking them. They are brilliant!

Thanks again to Joan for the following pics.

I also need to thank Neil Rolland who came along to take photos. What an amazing job he has done as well. See his pics below. We don’t even have the ‘professional’ pics yet. The Luminate photographer will be hard pushed to top what we already have!

Irene

Denis

Ed Link from Perth U3A Ukulele group

Barbara

Anne H

Marge

John

Liz & Maggie

Sandra & George

Pat

Tayside Silver Strummers @ the Space

I feel we need a See you all tomorrow! 🙂

The Next Adventure Begins!

Now that the excitement of our fantastic experience at the Space is beginning to settle down, we will have to focus on future events. Our next concert is on Saturday 31st October @ The Cabin, Monifieth. Please click Monifieth Fund-raiser Playlist 31 October and print off the proposed playlist if possible.

I have changed the following songs to Dee Ukes format and added to our website if you wish to print those off as well:

• Last Thing On My Mind in C
• Last Thing On My Mind in G – we will decide on the preferred key on Tuesday
• Sunny Afternoon
• Rock Around the Clock
• Leaving On A Jet Plane
• Dirty Old Town
• Gypsy Rover – I haven’t included this one on the main playlist for the moment

We have also been invited to play at a Sheltered Housing complex in Martingale Gardens on Thursday 17th December at 2pm. The playlist will be mainly Christmas songs which we will start to look at in the near future. Last year’s Christmas songbook can be downloaded from the Songsheets tab on the website and has 10 songs. We will add some new songs as we have been asked to play for between 1 and 1.5 hours.

On Tuesday we will go over songs from our most recent playlist. See you all soon. 🙂

Woo Hoo!

What an amazing time we all had at the Space! I can’t believe that there was almost a full house in the auditorium. Our audience numbers were between 150 and 160. Superb!

Thank you so much to everyone who contributed towards such a successful Tayside Silver Strummers’ concert. Many thanks also to my Dee Ukes’ friends who invited/persuaded/bribed their friends and family to come along to support us.The audience was phenomenal and certainly contributed towards creating a fabulous atmosphere. Thanks also to those who went out of their way to bring along people with special needs and give them the opportunity to enjoy a unique experience.

We had two photographers there on the day. Once I have possession of the pics, I will then share with you all.

What a privilege to be part of such an amazing group of people. Roll on the next adventure! 🙂

Good luck!

Best wishes to everyone taking part in Tayside Silver Strummers’ concert tomorrow at The Space.

We made it into the What’s On section of today’s Courier, along with our rehearsal photo!

We’ll have a fantastic time. Can’t wait to get strumming! 🙂

Four Sleeps and Counting!

It’s the final push for ticket sales for our Luminate Concert on Saturday. I’m quite confident we are going to have a decent size of audience as many tickets have been bought and many others have said that they are buying tickets on the day.

We practised a few songs from the Luminate playlist today:

• Killiecrankie
• All I Have To Do Is Dream
• Leaving on a Jet Plane
• Rock Around the Clock

All are sounding good and we will have time to have a final rehearsal on the day.

As we have had a request to include an Elvis song in our general playlist we tried Wooden Heart and, following a brief German lesson, it is sounding pretty good already. Thanks to all our language specialists!

We also had a go at Can’t Help Falling In Love With You. Despite having quite a lot of chords, our first attempt at this song is very encouraging. We will try both again next week.

Other songs we practised today:

• I Wanna Be Like You – Dee Ukes version is slightly different from Happy Ukes version, so make sure you have the DU one.
• Sunny Afternoon – sounding good
• Dirty Old Town – we added a mouth organ section and it sounds great!
• Last Thing On My Mind – We tried this song in the key of C which some like and others feel is a bit high. We shall try it in the key of G and the key of A next week and then decide.

I have altered some of our favourite Perth songs to Dee Ukes format with, in some cases, a few minor changes. To avoid confusion, I have not put them on our website yet. Once our concert at the Space is over, I will upload them to our website and let you all know so that you can download them if you wish. Obviously you also have the option of keeping the Perth version and just writing on any changes.

I also mentioned that we have been invited to join forces with Anne’s folk singing class to provide around 20  minutes of entertainment at the U3A Christmas Lunch at the Woodlands Hotel on Monday 14th December at 12.30 f0r 12.45pm. If you intend to come, then you need to secure a place. Click here for the information you need. We had a great time last year!

Our next Sunday Sessions meeting takes place this Sunday, 25 October. I hope you can all come along to see our special guests Pete Clark and Gregor Lowry who will be entertaining us from 7.00 – 8.15pm. £5 per person will be collected at the door. There will be limited time for others to perform for the last part of the evening. Depending on numbers wishing to perform Dee Ukes could sing All I Have To Do Is Dream and, if time, Bring me Sunshine.

Hope to see ALL of you on Saturday, either on stage or as part of the audience. It is going to be amazing! 🙂

Billboard News!

We’ve made it to a billboard in Monifieth High Street. Woohoo!

Shame about the spelling. Still, the message is clear. We’re on our way.

Thanks for spotting this Alan. 🙂

Elvis Request

For our class on Tuesday 20th October, we will start with rehearsing a few songs from our Luminate playlist, possibly:

Killiecrankie

All I Have to do is Dream

Leaving on a Jet Plane

Rock Around the Clock

The above list may be added to if anyone wishes to go over some of the other songs for our imminent Space concert..

We have been asked by a member of the Monifieth Women’s Group if we could include an Elvis song during our concert on Saturday 31st October. I have added Wooden Heart and Can’t Help Falling In Love to our website so that we can try them out on Tuesday. Please print them off if you can. You might also want to have a listen to Elvis himself singing them, particularly for the section in German! This will be another first for us!

As we are updating our Monifieth playlist, I want to try out the following songs for possibly inclusion:

I Wanna Be Like You

Sunny Afternoon – Perth version at the moment

Dirty Old Town – Perth version at the moment

Whiskey in the Jar

Last Thing On My Mind – Perth version at the moment

Sloop John B

Depending on how much time we have, we may play others from our current playlist. See you all next week. 🙂

Round Up – 13th October

We welcomed back Eunice who came along with her bass and joined in with the fun.

We also tried out a new seating arrangement which initially threw some people into a state of turmoil. However, once we settled down, most people seemed to prefer it. The main advantages were there was more room between seats, yet we were all closer together! How did that happen?

We have been asked to do a 1 hour concert at St Margaret’s Residential Home, Victoria Road on Monday 2nd November from 2.00 – 3.00pm. As the venue is quite small numbers will have to be restricted to between 6/8 players. We had a brief discussion about the best way to organise this. One suggestion was to put names in a hat. Another suggestion was to have some form of rota system. We will decide next week.

We started off by practising:

• I Wanna be Like You – Dee Ukes version is a bit different from Happy Ukes version. We practised the last (new) verse a couple of times to get used to fitting in the words. It sounded really good with the added bass.
• Bring Me Sunshine v1.1 – Perfect!

From our Luminate programme we practised the following songs:

• Jambalay – Kazoos are still working their magic on this song
• Leaving on a Jet Plane – We practised slowing down the last line

We then moved on to playing some songs we haven’t done for a while, with a view to updating our playlist for The Monifieth concert on Saturday 31st October:

• Sunny Afternoon – Eunice started this one off with a fabulous bass introduction which lifted the whole song. Brilliant!
• Mingulay Boat Song version 1.1 – We decided to take out another chord C at the end. The ending is now Mingu-[F] lay  F   <C>  We will try this again next week.
• Sloop John B – I think this was the best we have sounded with this song and we agreed it should be included in the updated playlist.
• Dirty Old Town – We used the Perth version and really like the song, but will put into Dee Ukes format. There are various ways this song can be sung. Here are a couple of versions, one from the Dubliners and one from the Pogues. We can, of course, put our own spin on it, but I definitely feel a mouth organ should feature! 🙂

• Caledonia – lovely song, but would need to be selective about which audience would appreciate this one.

Many thanks to Eunice for coming along and helping to keep us together with her bass. I am pleased to say that she is joining us again next week. Woo hoo!

Thanks again to everyone for all your hard work. October is proving to be our most exciting month to date! See you all next week. 🙂

On stage for the second time in 3 Days!

Dee Ukes had the pleasure to perform today at the Gerard Hall, Monifieth for the Over 60s Club. Wow! What a brilliant audience they turned out to be. From the first song they were singing, swaying and clapping along. Many thanks to Margaret Strachan for inviting us along and many thanks to the other committee members who looked after us so well and provided tea and biscuits at half time. What’s more they want us back! It would be an absolute pleasure.

Here are a few short video clips of us in action. 🙂