The History of the Fall-feit: Back in 2009 I caved to pressure to write up Jason Mraz’s I’m Yours. About an hour after that post went up I was laying unconscious on the floor with a head injury before being taken to hospital. (I’m leaving out the details in hope you’ll assume I was doing something sexy and dangerous.)
This was clearly beyond a coincidence. The only rational explanation was that the wrathful Indie Gods were displeased with me writing up a song people liked and decided I must be punished. To placate them, I had to write up tab for the most indie and least popular band in history, The Fall.
Since then I’ve been required to tab a Fall song whenever doing anything vaguely populist. There are two pop songs this week so I’m getting my Fall-feit in early. And, since it was Halloween, I went with their spooky instrumental Mansion.
I absolutely love Keston Cobblers’ Club’s new album One, for Words. It’s the best British album of the year. (This one would have been close if the second half was as good as the first.)
The Cobblers kick off this week’s selection looking much better dressed than usual in a session for Burberry. Joining them are Daniele Andrade, LP, Ali Ingle, McFly and plenty more besides.
Gary Jugart has put together a great (and free) ebook of fingerpicking studies Ukulele Arpeggiator. I’ve really enjoyed playing through them. Here’s a video I made of one of the studies. The difficulty ranges from straightforward to very tricky. If you’re looking to improve your picking you’ve got to grab it.
I’ve been without a TV for a long time. It’s only now that Netflix has come to the UK that I’ve been catching up on things. One show that passed me by until recently was Bob’s Burgers. Turns out it’s packed with ukulele music (by the man behind the show Loren Bouchard) and stars America’s ukulele sweetheart. So here’s a belated tab of the show’s theme.
The whole thing is strummed. I’ve indicated the strumming pattern in the first bar and you can use that pattern all the way through.
I tacked one of the little interludes that crops up in the show at the end.
I would have put have put good money on Beirut cropping up on the new Tribute to Caetano Veloso album alongside Beck, Devendra Banhart and Seu Jorge.
But we still have their cavaquinho cover of Veloso’s O Leãozinho. I based the chords on the Beirut version but the original is pretty much identical.
The cavaquinho is tuned DGBD (higher than the ukulele). So to put it in the same range I’ve written the chords for use with a capo at the 7th fret.
Without a Capo
Beirut/Caetano Veloso – O Leãozinho (No Capo Chords)
It gets fiddly playing the chords with a capo at the 7th fret. So here are the open chords if you don’t want the faff.
Suggested Strumming
For a simple strum you can use this twice for each chord:
d – d u – u
The only place that doesn’t work is with the F – Fmaj7 change. If you want to keep things simple you can just play the pattern once for each of those. Or you can do something similar to the way Beirut play it:
Hard to hear the music this week over all the names being dropped. Namecheckees – in descending order of awesome – include: blues-ukulelist Little Laura Dukes, God-child Jesus, particle-botherer Brian Cox and dog-judger Stacey Solomon.
The UOGB documentary The Ukes Down Under is now available on DVD. Here’s the funniest DVD extra: the Aquila String Harvest. And if that’s of interest to you then, parliamentary sketch writer, Simon Hoggart knows exactly what you’re like, “They like to watch Miranda on TV, and hold their office Christmas parties at Café Rouge. They own little cars which have nicknames. Many belong to the Liberal Democrats.”
I sometimes struggle to convey just how glamorous the ukulele scene here in Derby is. Luckily, there’s a video that displays it perfectly: Gary Wilmot ukulele flashmobs Derby Westfield Centre. In other Derby ukulele news, The Re-entrants are splitting up but reforming as Phil Doleman and Ian Emmerson and performing original songs.
Bacharach and David – Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head (Instrumental Tab)
Continuing the Hal David tribute with Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head. Not particularly a lyrical highlight of his but it did have a ukulele in. At least the original version did. It was replaced by a guitar in the rejiggered version.
I’ve kept the arrangement simple enough that it can be played with your thumb. Although I’m using flick-ups in my version.
That is until the end section. That bit is very silly (that’s why I included it) so you’d be well within your rights just to ditch it.
I’m a big fan of Uke of Carl’s arrangements of various theme tunes for ukulele. A while back I had him write a guest post with a bunch of his tabs. Now’s he’s launched his own website and a series of ebooks so I asked him to write another guest post. And he was kind enough to do just that.
I didn’t begin life as a Ukulele player. I started off on the guitar, and like many have, gravitated toward the Uke. Despite being a metal head at heart, I couldn’t help but be drawn to the Spanish guitar sound. One day I was lucky enough to stumble upon the Julio S, Sagreras Guitar Method and it changed the way I looked at the instrument. For this book, I’ve taken a few of his exercises and tried to do something new with them. I’ve changed some keys to be more Uke friendly, played around with the time signatures and chopped them up so they are almost entirely new pieces.
This book is suited to the beginner who is up for a challenge and for the more advanced player looking to add further tunes to their repertoire.
This one was tricky begin with, as there are so many great Classical pieces to choose from. However, I scoured my library and carefully picked 8 pieces which I then adapted for the Uke. Classical guitarists will be familiar with many of these pieces but even if you haven’t heard them before, you’ll find them pleasing to the ear. It’s a well paced book which begins with some simple pieces and develops into something a little more challenging.
This is the perfect compliment to book one. It features a further 8 pieces of varying levels. I’ve kept it quite diverse with regard to composers and have chosen memorable pieces from, amongst others, Sor, Giuliani, Carulli and Tarrega. These pieces will really test your playing skills and will serve as ideal party pieces once you master them.
There’s something about Jewish music and, in particular, Klezmer that gets me excited. I play a lot of it on my Clarinet and when I scoured the web for Ukulele pieces, I found very few. That’s when the idea for this book came to me. It was a pleasure researching this one. As well as the obvious, ‘Hava Nagila’, I’ve included ‘Hatikvah’ ‘Dance of Delight’ and ‘Ez Pachach’, which is my own composition. You’ll have great fun with this book. There are some challenges but even a beginner will be able to play through some of the pieces.
Hopefully there’s plenty to choose from here and you might find something you’ve not tried before. Make sure you subscribe to my site for future updates. I have a couple of more books in the works and have only just finished the tab for ‘Mr. Benn’ and ‘Duck Tales’, which will appear very soon.
Thanks to Al for this opportunity. Without his encouragement I wouldn’t have had half the publicity I’ve had. Also thanks for the inspiration. When I first saw this, I thought, ‘It can be done!’ and I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve seen this.
