I don’t know how many times I’ve heard this tune. Several hundred I expect. But not once did it occur to me that there might be a reason he’s going on about tossed salads and scrambled eggs. Frasier writer, Ken Levine asked the tune’s composer Bruce Miller who explained, “these were things that were “mixed up” like Frasier Crane’s patients”.

And it’s not just the patients. The theme is a mixed up, mouse painting, moon howling kinda song. For a tune that only lasts 36 seconds this really packs in a lot of different notes. My advice is to throw yourself into it an not worry much about any mistakes.

Links

Buy it on iTunes
TV theme tabs and chords

If you’re looking for something festive to learn here’s a complete rundown of everything Christmassy on the site.

Christmas eBooks

I’ve written 3 collections of easy Christmas tabs: How to Play Christmas Ukulele, Christmas Ukulele 2 and Christmas Ukulele 3.

You can pick up all three for the price of 2 by buying the whole Christmas Trilogy at once. And you can get an extra $2 off if you use this code in the shopping cart: theothertinytim

Chords

12 Days of Christmas
A Christmas Duel – The Hives and Cyndi Lauper
All I Want for Christmas Is You – Mariah Carey
Chiron Beta Prime – Jonathan Coulton
Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) – Darlene Love
Christmas for Cowboys – John Denver/Ballard C Boyd
Christmas in July – Jonathan Coulton and John Roderick
Cold Outside – Julia Nunes & Wade Johnson
Fairytale of New York – The Pogues
Fuck Christmas – Eric Idle
Give the Jew Girl Toys – Sarah Silverman
It’s Cliched to be Cynical At Christmas – Half Man Half Biscuit
iPod X-mas – Hello Saferide
Let It Snow
Lumberjack Christmas/Christmases Past – Sufjan Stevens
Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want To Fight) – The Ramones
Merry Xmas Everybody – Slade
No Christmas – Zee Avi
Present Face – Garfunkel and Oates
Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree
Run, Run Rudolph – Chuck Berry
Santa Baby
Santa Will Find You – Mindy Smith/Tripping Lily
Silver Bells – She & Him
Space Christmas – Allo Darlin
The Christmas Song – Weezer
The Christmas Song Song – Rocky and Balls
White Christmas
Winter Wonderland
Year End Letter – Garfunkel and Oates
You’re a Mean One Mr Grinch

Tabs

Away in a Manger
Carol of the Bells
Christmastime Is Here (from Charlie Brown)
German Christmas Carols
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas (Instrumental)
Jingle Bell Rock
Jingle Bells
Little Drummer Boy
Mele Kalikimaka
Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence
O Christmas Tree (Single Note Version)
Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer
Silent Night (Harmonics Version)
Silent Night (Single Note Version)
Sleigh Ride – U900 / The Ventures
Various – Wilfried Welti’s Musikalisches Naschwerk für Solo Ukulele
We Three Kings
White Christmas

Tripping Lily – Santa Will Find You

Tripping Lily’s ukulele cover of Mindy Smith’s Santa Will Find You has been the video to kick off every Christmas UkeTube since 2009. The song has the perfect mix of melancholy and jazziness for a Christmas song. And Tripping Lily played it so well. So it’s well past time I wrote it up.

Suggested Strumming

Two main strums will get you through this. Both of them just down strums.

For the more sparse parts you can just do two down strums per bar.

For the other parts you can do six down strums with the fourth being emphasised. Like this:

d d d D d d

In the verse and intro: Once each on E and Emaj7. Twice on everything else.

In the chorus: The first two lines the same as the verse. The last two strum the pattern once for each chord.

Here’s how that strum sounds:

Strum

Twiddly Bits

Here’s the guitar line in the intro and throughout adapted for ukulele:

Intro

There’s a slight change right at the end. In the outro section replace the last two bars with this:

Links

Buy the Mindy Smith version
Tripping Lily Facebook
MonicaRizzio.com
More Christmas Tabs and Chords

Full Playlist

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. I’ve just released the final part of the Christmas Ukulele Trilogy: Christmas Ukulele III: Return of the Magi. And the updated version of How to Play Blues Ukulele (if you bought the previous version and haven’t had an email from me with a download for the new one send me a message with the email address you used when you bought it and I’ll hook you up.

There are discount codes for both if you buy before Christmas:

Blues: ibluemyself ($5 off)
Christmas: theothertinytim ($2 off the Christmas III or the trilogy)

New Releases

– Rerelease for an old UOGB Christmas album: Never Mind The Reindeer.
– AJ Leonard – Soft Lights And Sweet Music.
– Pre-order Molly Lewis’s stage musical Thanksgiving v Christmas.

Videos

– Too Many Cookies! Which will only make sense if you’ve seen this. In case you were wondering about the chords

Learning

– Tips for playing ukulele with a guitar player.

To give you an idea of the tabs in the Christmas Ukulele III ebook, here’s an arrangement in the same styles and with a similar difficulty.

The Little Drummer Boy is (supposed to be) based on an old Czech folk melody. But it only became well known when rearranged and given lyrics in the 1950s for the Harry Simeone Chorale version.

Full Arrangement

This arrangement is designed to be played solo. It can all be played with your thumb on your picking hand. When you play more than one string just strum your thumb down until you hit the last note in the chord.

The notes in brackets here are backing notes. They’re not part of the melody so play them softly.

Melody Arrangement

This version is even simpler. It splits up the chords and the melody into different parts. So you can play this version with a friend or with this MP3. It’s stereo split so you can play along with either the chords or the melody.

Melody Version

For the strumming here I’m just doing two down strums per bar.

Links

Buy the Harry Simeone Chorale version iTunes
Christmas Ukulele III

It’s the third and final ebook of the Christmas Ukulele Trilogy. I promise not to make any shitty prequels.

Ten more Christmas tunes arranged as easily as possible so you’ll be able to play them if you’re called on to provide a festive performance at any point.

This collection is the most varied so far. As well as a selection of Christmas carols it includes the Appalachian tune Christmas Time Will Soon Be Over (as made famous by Jack White’s version on the Cold Mountain soundtrack), the creepy English folk song Down in Yon Forest and Hanukkah O Hanukkah.

Buy Christmas Ukulele III here

If you don’t own Christmas Ukulele and Christmas Ukulele 2 yet, you can pick up all three for the price of two:

Buy all three here

What You Get

– Tabs of full arrangements for these traditional Christmas favourites:

Christmas Time Will Soon Be Over?
Ding Dong Merrily on High?
Down in Yon Forest
Hanukkah O Hanukkah
I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day
It Came Upon a Midnight Clear (The “Hymn” version.)
O Holy Night
O Little Town of Bethlehem (The Ralph Vaughan Williams version.)
Pat-A-Pan
What Child Is This? (Greensleeves)

They’re all arranged without any fancy finger work. The picking hand can all be done with the thumb. (The exception is Christmas Time Will Soon Be Over which has a simple arrangement and a more difficult one). They’re intended for high-g tuning.

– Super-simple melody arrangements of all those tunes. Only one note at a time. These include tab, standard notation and lyrics.

– MP3s of the melody arrangements. Stereo split so you can play along with either the melody or the chords.

– A PDF with performance notes and tips on playing all versions of the tunes.

Quick warning: if you’re using iPad/iPhone/Android you can’t download everying directly to your gadget. But there is a link to download the main body of the book (with the performance notes and the full arrangements) directly to you device.

What They Sound Like

Full Arrangement Videos

Melody Versions

Here’s what the melody-only versions sound like. The melody tab also has chord names so you can be accompanied by a friend. Or if, like me, you’re a badass loner you can play along with these mp3s. They’re split so the left hand side has the chords and the right has the melody.

Christmas Time Will Soon Be Over

Ding Dong Merrily on High

Down in Yon Forest

Hanukkah O Hanukkah

I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day

It Came Upon a Midnight Clear

O Holy Night

O Little Town of Bethlehem

Pat-A-Pan

What Child Is This?

Buy It

Buy Christmas Ukulele III:

Buy Christmas Ukulele III here

Buy Christmas Ukulele III with Christmas Ukulele and Christmas Ukulele 2:

Buy all three here

After 9 years of being together, the Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra have put out their debut album Be Mine Tonight. It’s a collection of songs from New Zealand largely unknown in these more civilised parts. It serves as a guide to all the songs we’ve missed out on from impressively magnificent treasures that should have been global mega-hits to impressively, magnificent cheese.

One song that did make it global is Lorde’s Team. And that’s the one I chose to write up.

Slap a capo on the first fret and the chords are straightforward. Both songs are in the same key and the chords are pretty much identical. So this will work for playing along with both of them.

Suggested Strumming

When I’m playing along with the Lorde version I like to do all downstrums as the main strum. But with the third strum in each group of four emphasised to match the clap. So with the capital D being a strong downstrum:

d d D d

The only difference is the short Dm chords in the chorus and outro. There I just do two downstrums.

Together it sounds like this (slow then up to speed):

Strum

The WIUO is a bit more laid back and I go with ‘d u’s as the main strum.

d u d u d u d u

Links

Buy the Lorde version
Buy the WIUO version
Royals chords
More WIUO tabs, chords and whatnots

I’ve just released an updated version of How to Play Blues Ukulele ebook with a snazzy new look, more examples, YouTube videos of every example, and more backing tracks.

If you’ve bought the ebook in the past you should have had an email from me with a link to download this version (it may have ended up in your spam folder). If you don’t have it shoot me a message with the email address you used when you purchased it and I’ll get you a copy.

Buy it here

Or find out more about it here.

What It’s For?

Way back in 2008 I was working on a tab of the James Bond theme and I’d reached that, “I hate this instrument, I can’t play it, I’m going to throw it into the canal” stage. I was pulling my hair out trying to get it together (as you can tell in subsequent videos).

A few days later I was listening to music and Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Look at Little Sister came on. I grabbed my ukulele and started jamming along to it. I was immediately refreshed and energized by it.

There’s something about that combination of having just a few notes to choose from and complete freedom to do whatever you like with them that the blues gives you. It’s exciting, inspiring and makes you feel like a rockstar.

The goal of the ebook is to give you the tools to help you do that too. So you can jam with friends, along with records or by yourself.

Side-note: check out what happens in that SRV video after he breaks a string in the solo.

What’s In It?

To give you an idea, are the last two examples in the ebook which take some of the chord progressions, soloing techniques, licks and scales from it contains and combines them to make a short solo.

The A Blues

The C Blues

You can get a full run down of the ebook here. But here are the basics:

– Learn to improvise and jam in the blues style.

– Learn the most common blues chord progressions, variations and adaptations.

– Packed with ideas and techniques for blues soloing.

– Play riffs and licks in the style of blues musicians from Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters to Stevie Ray Vaughan.

– Blues chord patterns and strum patterns in a variety of styles.

– 123 examples all with mp3s and YouTube videos.

– 4 backing tracks to jam along with.

– Minor pentatonic scales and blues scales for every key.

– Contains chord charts and tab for re-entrant, C-tuned ukulele.

Buy It

Buy it here

Or learn more about it here

Full Playlist

Read the rest of this entry »