Mainland are following Kala into the pastel and plastic ukulele field. Interesting that both brands seem to be distancing themselves from the plastics ukes. Kala market theirs as Makala. And the Mainlands are missing the logo on the headstock and seem to have Gecko on the soundhole sticker. Also hoosierhiver (of Mainland) was playing down […]

Long time friend of the blog, Shigeto Takahashi‘s album Roots Trip is for download on iTunes and on CDBaby. Must have tracks: Hilo March, Kohara March. Unfortunately, two of the best tracks (Peanut Vendor and Rhapsody in Blue had to be dropped for copyright reasons). Hull Ukulele Group have made their Halloween/Guy Fawkes songbook available […]

Duelling Banjos (Tab) I’ve had this one knocking around, half finished for years. The version I’ve ended up with diverges from the original quite significantly. As well as being shorter, the fast section is completely different in terms of notes. The most important thing is to vary the tone between the guitar and the banjo […]

Jim Beloff’s The Ukulele: A Visual History must be the longest surviving ukulele book in my collection. Others have been discarded as useless or had the info sucked out of them and left in a draw. So it’s about time I got round to giving it a review. What You Get 125 very heavily illustrated […]

Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain – Teenage Kicks (Chords) It was the anniversary of John Peel’s death yesterday. I was going to put up Napalm Death’s You Suffer in tribute. But after getting hate mail for my Dillinger Escape Plan post, I thought I’d go with something a bit more crowd pleasing. For this version […]

I’ve been getting a lot of comments from people complaining about the endless stream of songs I feature about Ukrainian constitutional reform. I don’t want this blog to become musically 1 dimensional so, with deep apologies to those of working on snappy rhymes for Leonid Kuchma and fitting Law No. 2222-IV into pleasant scansion, this […]

An interesting article about ukulele sales talking to a number of sellers (via Arch on the Cosmos). Despite a few clangers (Kamaka was established in nineteen-sixTEEN rather than nineteen-sixTY, and there’s still no ukulele in I’m Yours) it’s well worth a read through. It’s a long article so here are a few quotes: Sammy Ash […]

City traders are relieving all the stress of gorging on taxpayer handouts by taking up the ukulele. Although Lorraine and Suzie are denying their ‘quotes’ and would never say anything as toss-potty as, “This is definitely in vogue in the City world at the moment: It seems to be the team-building course du jour.” Plus, […]

I’ve included the video with this one because I assume most colonials are unfamiliar with the Happy Mondays and I can’t think of any way to explain what a Bez is. But you’ll need one to play this. Lots of riffs to get a hold of in Step On – all of them presented here […]

Hard to believe a song this gimmicky can still sound so great after 20 years. No doubt it’s down to having one of the greatest bass riffs of all time – pilfered from Herbie Hancock’s Bring Down the Birds and very much improved upon. Here’s the riff in C: In C And with a bit […]