I’ve been enjoying Anything Goes Orchestra’s album Mr Otis Regrets recently which includes a ukulele cover of Imelda May’s Johnny Got a Boom Boom. Then Imelda May came out with this ukulele cover of Blondie. And next week I assume Blondie are releasing their Anything Goes Orchestra ukulele tribute CD soon to complete the circle.
That got me wondering what the longest chain of ukulele covers is. Here’s my best attempt:
If you’ve got a good ukulele cover chain leave it in the comments.
Suggested Strumming
You can use this strum all the way through:
d – d u – u d u
When you have two bars of the same chord a good alternative is:
d – d u – u d u
– u d u – u d u
Twiddly Bits
Dreaming (Riffs Tab)
Al (super cool name for a ukulele player) integrates the riff from the original version into his ukulele version. In the verse this riff takes the place of the C – F move:
And the chorus this is used in the C – F part:
Blondie Version
Blondie – Dreaming (Chords)
The Blondie version is two frets higher. Which makes it a little more tricky to play on uke but still very playable.
– Craig Robertson is putting together a “Greatest Hats” collection of songs. Which is excellent news because he’s very prolific and I never know which album to recommend to new folks. He’s going to remaster the tracks but he’s also putting the originals up for free on his blog starting with The Hypnotist and She Likes to Pull the Wings Off Flies.
– Folkie colouring book.
The debate surrounding making the ukulele Hawaii’s official state instrument has officially become a farce. The choice between ukulele, steel guitar and ipu was too much for them to handle. One of the senators did realise that this was a decision even a child could handle and suggested putting it to a vote amongst primary and secondary schoolchildren. But they rejected that and decided the best thing to do is drop the bill and forget it ever happened. Politics in action.
If you’ve used Wilfried’s free ebooks Musikalisches Naschwerk für Solo Ukulele and Solo Ukulele für Einsteiger I’m sure you’re already itching to hand over your money. This collection is just as imaginatively and meticulously arranged as those. And I’d say it’s his most accomplished collection yet.
It’s such a broad and well put together collection I’ve been trying to convince him to charge more than €9 for it. So I recommend buying it quick in case I succeed.
Here are the tabs in the ebook (or I should say ebooks since it contains four ebooks with the tunes arranged and presented in different ways).
Renaissance
1 – The Squirrel’s Toy
2 – Villanella
3 – The King of Denmark’s Galliard
4 – Almande le Pied de cheval
5 – Tourdion (Video)
6 – Wilson’s Wilde (Video)
7 – Mr. Dowland’s Midnight (Video)
8 – Se l’aura spira tutta vezzosa (Video)
Folk and Romanticism
9 – Stenka Razin
10 – Dark Eyes (Video)
11 – Kalinka
12 – Plaisir d’amour
13 – Barcarolle
14 – Blind Mary
Fernando Sor
15 – Opus 60, No.1 (Video)
16 – Opus 60, No.2
17 – Opus 60, No.3
18 – Opus 60, No.4
The Magic Flute
19 – How strong is thy magic tone
20 – The birdcatcher am I
21 – That sounds so glorious (Video)
22 – The Queen of the Night
Johann Sebastian Bach
23 – Now all the woods are sleeping
24 – Edifying thoughts of a tobacco smoker
25 – Air Italien
The original version is tuned a bit sharp (my guess is the sped up the recording a touch). So if you’re trying to play along with the original it’s going to sound a bit off. But it should sound right with this live version. Plus Richard Hawley is playing guitar in this version so it’s automatically marvellous.
There are two main riffs. This verse riff is the easiest. All the picking is done with the index finger on the E-string and the thumb on the g-string.
Chorus
The chorus riff is much more involved and required a bit of rearrangement to make it fit on the uke. For the picking I use my thumb to pick the string nearest my face in that bar. Then employ my index and middle fingers as they’re needed.
I thought I’d keep the Britpop theme going with my favourite of the Britpop bands: Pulp. I couldn’t decided on just one song so there are two posts today. And there’s every chance of more in the future. They were a great band.
Disco 2000 is prime ukulele group fodder. It’s a got a big singalong chorus, simple chords and some fancy bits for the show offs.
For the folks who are keeping it simple in the chord sheet I’ve just referred to the main F and C chords (other than in the intro). You can play that and it’ll fit great. Or you can play the riff which switches in sus4 chords (a very common move in Pulp songs) like this:
You can use the same two bar pattern as the riff almost all the way through the song. So just the strumming goes like this:
d u d – x u – u
– u – u d u d –
Use that all through the verses and for the first two lines of the chorus. Then do d – d – d u d u on the Cm and two down strums each on the Fsus4 and F. Together that sounds like this:
They’ve been updated with a sleek new look more in line with the site. Plus more info, new arrangements and videos.
If You’ve Already Bought Them
Firstly, I’m insanely grateful. It means so much to me that people are willing to lay down a bit of their hard-earned money for my stuff. I couldn’t run the site without that support and after nearly 7 years of doing this it’s still amazing to me that it’s my job to write about ukuleles.
As a little thanks for that support if you bought the first edition of any of these books you get the second edition free. You should have had an email from me with a link to a new download last week. If you haven’t just send me a message with the ebook you bought and the email you used when you bought it and I’ll fix you up.
How to Play Ukulele Strums
The biggest problem I see new ukers having is with strumming patterns.
You can pretty easily find chords online for most songs but you’re usually left on your own to sort out a strumming pattern.
With this ebook I’m fixing that two ways:
– Providing a whole bunch of strumming patterns. There are 49 in the book covering different time signatures, genres and occasions. All with video and audio examples.
– Understanding how a strumming pattern fits into a song. I think this is the biggest barrier for new folks. After reading this book you should be able to listen to a song and have a much better idea of what strumming pattern to use and how it fits in with the song.
This is my most straight-ahead fun ebook. Before starting work on it I felt a bit in a rut with my playing. Like I was playing the same thing every day. So I started playing around with a slide and it got me really excited again.
In the short term it was exciting to have a new toy and new sounds to play around with.
Even more importantly in the long term it made me appreciate how restrictions can open up new ideas and new avenues. With a slide being less flexible than fingers I had to delve into new tunings and harmonics much more deeply than I had before.
And that’s what I hope people will get from reading this ebook. It’s definitely not a book for beginners. But if you’ve been playing a while and are feeling slightly jaded then I’d highly recommend playing around with a slide.
For the update I’ve made the anthems much easier to play. And I’ve added duet versions with easy to play, single-note melody and backing chords.
The ebook has:
– Easy to play solo ukulele arrangements of 7 national anthems.
– Even easier to play duet version with a single note melody and chords for backing.
– Australia, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, the UK, the USA (and a mystery bonus solo tab – which is less of a mystery if you’ve got good flag knowledge).
There’s some sort of amorphous Britpop 20th Anniversary going on at the moment with people celebrating and denigrating it.
Added to that, Damon Albarn has just released a ukulele song about an orphaned elephant. So I didn’t have any choice other than to write it up.
Alert: There are large swathes of this song where I’m not sure what’s happening in the lyrics so don’t trust those.
Suggested Strumming
This strumming pattern is a bit involved. Here it is:
You can do the exact same strum for the D – F – C bit.
Make sure you stop the strings from ringing on the rests (by releasing the pressure on your fretting hand and muting the strings with your strumming hand).
I’ve included the little descending bit at the end of the C chord. But if you find it too fiddly you can just play a straight C chord there.
Here’s the ukulele solo played in the live Kimmel version. It’s similar to the keyboard solo on the record. But different enough to screw you up if you try to play along with it.
