Steve Miller Band – The Joker (Chords)

I’ve felt in a bit of a rut recently. And I’ve found the best way to bust it is to changing things up a bit. So I slipped a slide on my finger and tried out some of my favourite slide guitar bits on uke. Including The Joker‘s pompatus packed solo.

If you’re in a similar position there’ll be more slide coming up in Thursday’s post and I wrote an ebook about slide playing.

Suggested Strumming

You can use this as the main strum:

d – d – d u d u

In the verse (and the first solo) you can use that once for every chord. But I like to mix it up with a “dudududu” on the last Bb of each line like this:

Verse Strum

You can use the main strum for almost all the choruses. But there’s a slight change in one chorus and the second solo with a C-Csus4 move. There I strum down twice on the C then “du” six times on the Csus4. Then two more downs and six “du”s on the Csus4. It sounds like this:

Chorus Strum

Twiddly Bits

Riff

Here’s the bass riff moved to ukulele:

A video posted by @ukulelehunt on Oct 27, 2016 at 11:16am PDT

Solo

,

First thing to do for the slide solo is to tune your A-string down to G. That creates an open-C tuning. Second thing to do is to make sure you mute the strings behind the slide and mute all the strings you’re not playing.

I threw the little wolf whistle that crops up a couple of times at the end of the solo. You don’t need much accuracy in playing it. I just slide up as far as I can go. Then slide up to about the tenth fret and down.

Links

The Joker on iTunes
How to Play Slide Ukulele