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About our group and how it works.

The start

The Vancouver Ukulele Circle was formed in September 2000 after Ralph Shaw, Vancouver's own "King of the Ukulele", and Virginia Ise put a small ad in a local newspaper. 

Who we are

The Vancouver Ukulele Circle now has about 450 mailing list members but still has no goals or objectives except to provide a place where ukulele enthusiasts can meet, play some songs and have a few laughs. About 70 or more people show up at any one evening. There has been a large growth spurt in the last year. Lately, it seems worth coming for dinner to get a seat. 

We consider anyone a member who shows up at any one evening. There are no membership fees, but we suggest a donation of $5 for the evening to pay our leader and to cover things like photocopies, parties and purchases of items of interest to members.

Members come from a wide variety of musical backgrounds.
Most of us use the GCEA tuning but other tunings are also welcome...and we have one or two baritone uke players too. Players play wooden ukes as well as banjo-ukes, chrome resonator ukuleles, plastic ukuleles ... you name it. If it has 4 strings and sounds like a ukulele then it is completely permissible.

Other instruments are also welcome as they provide wonderful accompaniment to our plonking. So far we have had 2 steel guitars, an electric bass guitar (now an electric bass ukulele), a trumpet, a banjo, a fiddle, a saw(!) and a normal guitar.

How it works

The VUC meets on the 3rd Tuesday of every month. Meetings for the past few years have been at Our Town, a very informal cafe at Kingsway and Broadway. Some of us meet at 6:30 pm for dinner and others join for the strumming that starts around 7:30pm. We all play together from our songbook for the first part of the evening. After the break, we have short performances (now limited to one tune) by up to a dozen willing people, followed by a few more tunes sung as a group. 

Our Songbook

We're now on our third compilation of tunes (225 in the third book) from which we select tunes to sing together for the first half of every evening. The songbooks will be available from Carol at the meetings, for $15.

Repertoire

Just to give you an idea, here are the tunes that begin with "S" from the current songbook :

Sadie Green
Save The Last Dance For Me Love
Sea Of Love
Shake My Sillies Out
Should I Stay or Should I Go
Side By Side
Silhouettes
Singin’ In The Rain
Six Little Ducks
Somethin’ Stupid
Something
Somewhere Over the Rainbow/
        What a Wonderful World
Stand By Me
Stay
Steppin' Out With My Baby
Stewball
Summer of '69
Summer Wind
Summertime
Sunny Afternoon
Superman’s Song
Surfin’ U.S.A.
Suspicious Minds
Sweet Caroline
Sweet Georgia Brown

Our history page has among others some photos from the start and our anniversary celebrations.

Have a look around

Bob Leong posted this video on YouTube from our Christmas meeting at Our Town Cafe.