The Beatles – Blackbird (Tab)
With there already being plenty of Beatles ukulele material around, I tend to avoid adding to the pile. But I couldn’t resist having a go at adapting the gorgeous picking of Blackbird for ukulele. I love the rising and falling lines. Particularly the chromatic rise and fall on the E-string in bars 5-8 of the tab.
It’s a challenging piece to play on the uke. There’s plenty of movement up and down the neck and some tricky picking. There are also loads of time signature changes in the song. But none of them are jarring. So if you know the song well they’re going to feel natural.
My arrangement uses thumb and two finger picking almost all the way through. There are two main patterns:
– The pattern in bar 1 alternating index and middle fingers (picking the E- and A-strings respectively) and the thumb picking the g-string.
– The pattern in bar 2 where the thumb alternates between the g- and C-strings.
There are 2 big exceptions. One is the picking is in bars 6 and 21. For those I’m alternating by thumb between the g- and E-strings. the other is bars 32-34 where I switch to strumming.
Great arrangement! I am excited to start tackling it this weekend. I already know one version of Blackbird but I will definitely be learning this one as well. It is my probably my favorite Beatles tune.
Keep up the good work, hope you had a good summer break.