For a band that has a career’s worth of songs about lazing on Californian beaches, there’s not a lot of ukulele in their songs. But their latest album has a ukulele-heavy song and the uke slides neatly into the Beach Boys sound. Also up this week is a blistering version of Classical Gas by sanfordandsong, […]

One of my favourite ukulele tunesters, Nicholas Abersold has released his album Porridge free on Bandcamp. It’s packed with top songs so grab it while there are still free downloads available. Matt Kresling has made a travelogue about his trip to Madagascar with his ukulele and you can watch part one of The Madagascar Journals […]

Mills, Godfrey and Scott – Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty (Tab) Following on from The Queen is Dead on Tuesday, here’s an arrangement of the song that kicks off the track, Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty. It was written during World War I and has a bunch of music hall features. […]

As promised in the Hip Hop Riffs for Ukulele post, here’s an updated list of the riff posts on the blog. The idea with these riffs isn’t to play the whole song or that the suit the ukulele particularly well. It’s to throw them in to your playing for a bit of light relief and […]

The Smiths – The Queen Is Dead (Chords) A long weekend of Jubilee nonsense has put me in the mood for a song saying how great regicide is. This is a tricky one to fit the lyrics against the chords. Morrissey’s lack of respect for non-democratic rule is only matched by his lack of respect […]

A Dylan cover from the Leftover Cuties to belatedly celebrate his birthday (much overshadowed on the net thanks to him sharing it with Maru). Also this week: Arborea do a session for NPR, the steam-punk Posh and Becks sing a murder ballad and Herman VDC picks up a timple. At the behest of JimUke, I’ve […]

It used to be that you could only legally post covers of public domain songs to YouTube. But last year YouTube struck up a deal with music publisher. That meant publishers who opted would get money from cover versions and nobody would get in trouble. Which would be great except when Andy Baio at Wired […]

The Guitar Riffs for Ukulele series is mostly packed with rock music. But I like to broaden things out a bit now and then. So here’s a bunch of riffs from hip hop. Jay-Z and Kanye West – Ni**as in Paris Riff This has to be my favourite riff of last year. Which is really […]

Can you guess these ten ukulele players/acts from the clues given? Once you have your guesses, check your answers here. Then leave your score in the comments along with your darns, waahooooos and ‘how the hell was I supposed to guess that?’s. If you hover over the photos you might get an extra clue. 1 […]

Train – Sing Together (Chords) I’ve had a few requests for this ukulele song from Train’s new album already. So I thought I best get this one done before it turns into another Hey Soul Sister stand-off. Plus I like this one more than Hey Soul Sister. If you want to play along with the […]