Following on from the beginner lessons, you’re rocking through the easy chords, have your strumming down and learnt some fundamentals. In this section we’ll kick it up a notch with some more advanced chords. Step 1: Barre Chords – Barre chord playing tips – Barre chords and inversions – Songs with barre chords: Ingrid Michaelson [...]
Archive for February, 2010
You’ve just got your hands on a ukulele (or are just thinking of buying one). Here are a few things to read and songs to play that’ll get you up to speed quickly. Step One: Learn the basics – So You’ve Just Got Your First Ukulele – a free PDF I put together for beginners [...]
Mississippi Blues (Tab) Since his arrangement of In the Mood, I’ve been looking forward to seeing what David would come up with next and I wasn’t disappointed. His version of Mississippi Blues has plenty of bluesy licks. And he was kind enough to let me share the arrangement here. Subscribe to David on YouTube More [...]
As far as I’m concerned, the UOGB’s performance at the Proms is the high-water mark of the ukulele revival (so far). If you’re not familiar with the Proms, they’re a series of straight classical music concerts that have been held at the Royal Albert Hall for the last 115 years and culminate in a display [...]
Sigur Ros – Hoppipolla (Tab) I think this tune has to be the most overused piece of music on television: reality shows, sporting montages, documentaries. And now it’s been covered by the guy off of G4. That would usually be enough to kill off any song. But this song is so magnificent it gives me [...]
Favourite find this week is Cosmo Jarvis’s catchy, King-Blues like, bros-before-hoes anthem She’s Got You. Also this week (thanks to Oren) is super(ish) group Operation Aloha hewn from members of Gomez (it’s Ian Ball on uke), Maroon 5, Phantom Planet and others who met up on Hawaii and, inevitably, end up using a uke. Familiar [...]
A bunch of great uke photos this week: – If you follow Carmel Myers, Wild-eyed ukulele player, Ukulele player bores man to sleep. Hee Haw ukulele, wagon ukulele. Tenor banjolele from Beansprout. Murtlewood Ko’olau solid-body electric.
If you’re looking for something a bit more ambitious than the usual fare for you ukulele group/orchestra/band, James Hill has put a number of big band ukulele arrangements up for sale. It’s all high and low G friendly and in C and D tuning. To get an idea of what it sounds like, check out [...]
If you’ve been keeping a close eye on the blog, you’ll know I’m a big fan of daddystovepipe’s bluesy ukulele playing. Such a big fan I’ve decided to include his fingerpicking blues ebook in the How to Play Ukulele section. The ebook makes a great follow-up to How to Play Blues Ukulele. It takes the [...]
The uke community obviously has a big love for woolen puppets. Last year it was Rod Thomas’s sock puppets and this year’s winner is the adorable Japanese duo U900. It’s a deserving winner and I caught up with U900′s human representative Yosuke Kihara to learn more about them. What’s the history of U900? Rabbit U [...]
