Tune-Yards – FIYA (Tab)
I started a new hobby blog today about African guitar music. There’s not a whole lot of crossover between ukuleles and African music but the one obvious link is Tune-Yards. Merrill Garbus cropped up on a couple of tracks on the recent Red Hot + Fela album including the standout track Lady with ?uestlove, Angelique Kidjo and others.
So today I’ve written up one of her African-influenced tracks FIYA.
The tab shows the riffs used in each section of the song (not the whole tabs).
The Tuning
The tuning on this one is weird. I think it’s baritone tuning (on a tenor ukulele) with a high-d string. But that high-d is tuned half a step to Db. So it’s dbGBE.
Standard Tuning Version
In case you don’t fancy making the effort for that tuning here’s a version in standard tuning that more or less works out:
Tune-Yards – FIYA (Standard Tuning)
Here’s how that intro sounds:
The bridge:
And the chorus:
Links
Buy it on iTunes
tune-yards.com
Tune-Yards: Africa in Your Earbuds
Hatari tab
Powa tab
No crossover? Well Sir, p^lpease let me argue the opposite. I know somethings about highlife and soukous guitar basics:
– play really up high the neck. Make the first fretboard half your ‘dusty end’.
– play repetitive fingerpicking patterns, it’s the rhythm that counts most
– the ‘mi composé’ trick: switch out your 4th D string (mi for all Continental Europeans) for a 1st string, tuned a full octave above your average D (and right below the E pitch it’s intended for by the factory)
And voila: a re-entrant guitar, played rhythmically above the fifth fret – where have we heard that before?