hi cece from ukulele school here i'm here to talk to you today about how to tune your ukulele and how to hold your ukulele so first let's start with tuning most important thing is you can hear majorly put myself out of tune for this so to start um you can either go online or if you have a smartphone you can uh just type in ukulele tuner in your app store and you'll have a couple free ukulele tuners pop up you're going to want that because you're going to need that first note unless you have a piano near you which in case you can um press the g on your piano just above your middle c and that's the g that we're using to tune our bottom string to so again as we talked about in our last lesson our strings are g c e a so we're going to tune those to those notes so i already have my ukulele tuner up on my phone and i'm going to press um that bottom note so i can hear that and tune my bottom string to it because as you can hear again i threw myself way out of tune to do this so we're going to start with that g i'm a little flat so i'm going to need to tune up okay so i have that first note now after you have your first note you can go through on the tuner and tune to those but you're not always going to have your tuner by you so you're going to need to know how to tune without your without using the rest of the notes so we start with now we're going to tune our second string now the difference between this and tuning a guitar when we're tuning a guitar or a bass we're actually tuning to the same exact note and the same octave this note is going to be an octave lower so our g string is going to be an octave higher than our next string so i'm going to this is going to appear a high c and of course that string is out of tune but i need to match it to that note but not in that range so it's going to be a little lower so i'm going to go on my fifth fret and open on the next string until i match that note but again it's going to be lower since our our g string is our highest note on um in our strings so we got that one pretty good now so the first one is fifth fret open now our second note that we're going to tune to and now it's going to be more like tuning guitar where every where we're just tuning to the exact note so next we go to the fourth fret on our second string and our third string open that's not that bad and there's our next note and our last note we're going to go back to the fifth fret again and we're going to match the exact note again okay so it sounds like we're all tuned up so again we're gonna go five zero a little flat four zero and then five zero again and usually is all tuned up and again if you have one of the apps on your phone we then have all the notes so i can start with my g next go to my c e and i'm all in tune now we're going to learn how to hold our ukulele the proper way to hold your ukulele is to use your forearm to grip it so really our forearm is what's holding it down on our right side so i'm putting it in this pocket right here and i'm pretty much just cradling it with this arm and then this hand is free to move around this hand's not actually holding the ukulele steady this arm right here is holding the ukulele steady and one thing also that i've noticed too with um playing this is a lady tip here um as you can see i do not paint this fingernail i've noticed that um having that fingernail painted affects my tone and this is our main finger that we strum with you would think we're strumming with our thumb like we would on a guitar but we actually want to use this finger and have a little bit of a nail on it so we can strum using choosing to use the nail or our finger pad and then um for different strums like for our fan strum then we use our thumb on the way up um but for most of our strumming we're just going to use over again what we learned today tuning your ukulele we start at five zero four zero five zero holding your ukulele going to use that forearm to grip onto it and then strumming your ukulele we're going to use that finger and get used to not using our thumbs so um i hope that that was uh useful for all of you and we will see you later with some more videos you