Continuing this week’s celebration of free culture ukulelists ahead of Culture Freedom Day with a free ukulele mixtape.
All the tracks are distributed under a Creative Commons license so you’re free to pass them along to anyone you think might enjoy them. And if you find anyone you like I strongly recommend throwing a bit of money in their direction.
Tracklist
1. I Can’t Dance (I Got Ants In My Pants) – The Flamin’ Mamies
CC BY-NC-ND
2. Oh, the Wind Will Blow – Doug Hoyer
CC BY-NC-ND
It’s Culture Freedom Day on Saturday. It’s a day to celebrate artists who let others freely use, study, distribute and improve on their work. That’s particularly useful for anyone learning an instrument as it means you can pass around tabs and chord sheets, play their songs and put them up on YouTube without fear of being hassled by the man.
So this week is dedicated to ukulelists who participate in free culture. Starting with one of Jonathan Coulton’s non-uke songs.
Suggested Strumming
In the verse: You can use this as the main strumming pattern:
d – d – d u d u
Except for the two quick chords at the end of lines 1, 2, 5 and 6. Just two down strums each for those.
I’m on a little break at the moment (back on the 14th May) but I had to get a post up celebrating the music of Bob Brozman – who died last week – by listing just a few of the things I learnt from him.
Brozman was a huge inspiration for me. So much so he was one of the few things that could get me to leave my Unabomber-style shack and venture into the real world. His ukulele-only set at the Wukulele Festival in 2010 reinvigorated me.
I first saw Bob Brozman live in 2000 and it was a complete revelation for me. In terms of making music in general and the ukulele specifically. I already owned a ukulele but only messed around with it. His uke tour d’force, Ukulele Spaghetti (from Blue Hula Stomp) convinced me it was a much more interesting instrument than I’d realised. And my commitment to playing it well increased from that point.
Bob played music for 50 years, never got bored and was always stretching his playing. To keep his playing fresh and himself excited, he was always exploring the world, new instruments and new ways of playing.
The video above is a typically international jam with Takashi Hirayasu from Okinawa on sanshin and Djeli Moussa Diawara from Guinea on kora. But was also one of the finest proponants of homegrown American music as one of Robert Crumb’s Cheap Suit Serenaders.
If you ever find yourself bored with playing there’s always new genres, areas of the world and instruments to inspire you.
Where the Interesting Music Is
Being an active ethnomusicologist, he came up with plenty of theories on how music developed and where the best music could be found.
A recurring theme in Bob’s collaborations was islands. Collaborating with musicians from Hawaii, Reunion, Ireland, Okinawa and Papua New Guinea amongst many others. I asked him what was so special about islands, “Musical instruments and ideas, not always 100% perfectly expressed and understood, arrive on islands from distant places and cultures, percolate in isolation on the island, then emerge as new hybrid music. That plus the strength of nature so evident on islands makes for wonderful new music. Hawaii was one of the first “laboratories” for this phenomenon.”
He also, “started to realise that all the interesting music is happening at the frontiers of colonialism. Where the guitars have arrived.” (interview with OC-TV.net). His friend and producer Daniel Thomas (quoted in the Santa Cruz Sentinal): “He was always interested in what happens when a guitar is left behind in some culture or on some island with no instructions on how to use it, and how it adapts to what that culture feels is consonant.”
As ukulele players we tend to just play chords around the first few frets. But by venturing higher up the neck you can instantly make your playing much more interesting. Particularly if you’re playing with other ukers.
It made me see past the restrictions of the ukulele opened me up to chords, inversions and rhythms that I wouldn’t have otherwise come across.
There’s a World of Ukulele-like Instruments
Bob was a big proponant of the charango. Which he referred to as the “Bolivian super-ukulele.” And it’s not the only uke-similar instrument I came to through him. From Debashish Bhattacharya playing a four-string lap-steel anandi to the three-string sanshin played by Takashi Hirayasu.
How to Flip Cliches
From Jim D’Ville’s 3 questions with Bob Brozman: “Build a man a fire and you keep him warm for the night. Set him on fire and you keep him warm for the rest of his life.”
The Ukulele 2013 Spotify Playlist is filling up nicely with recent additions including the Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra, Victoria Vox, Kara Square and the aforementioned track from The Burning Hell.
I tried to stick to an alternating thumb pattern (moving between g and C). With index finger on E and middle on A. But the melody does sometimes stray onto the C-string which screws things up (such as the D in bar 4). Those notes I play with my index finger.
Links
I can’t find a place to buy the song but you can buy the movie.
If you don’t know that I wrote Ukulele for Dummies I obviously haven’t been doing enough shameless self-promotion. It did well enough that the Dummies folks wanted a follow up: Ukulele Exercises for Dummies. I’m highly allergic to the word “exercise” – I had to take half a dozen Benadryls just to write this intro – so I recommended they get Brett from Ukulele Tricks to write it.
I’ve been working with him on the book right from the start and he did a fantastic job with it. I’ve already learnt a ton from it and it’s inspired me to get more serious about practicing.
You can read all about the book on Ukulele Tricks. And to give you an idea of what’s in the book Brett’s kindly agreed to share this post on fingerpicking exercises.
Those Benadryls are really kicking in now so I’ll let Brett take over from here.
Fingerpicking comes in many styles on the ukulele. You might use a repeating fingerpicking pattern to pick out the chord progression of a song as you sing the melody; this is what I like to call rhythmic fingerpicking. Or, you might pluck out the melody of a song on the ukulele without singing, sometimes known as fingerstyle or solo fingerpicking. Whether your fingerpicking for rhythm or melody, practicing arpeggios is a great way to improve your fingerpicking in either style.
In this lesson, I select ten different arpeggios exercises plus a song by the famous 19th century composer Dionisio Aguado (1784-1849) from my new book Ukulele Exercises For Dummies that you can use to increase your ease of movement, speed and accuracy as you fingerpick the ukulele.
How to Fingerpick the Ukulele
The following arpeggio exercises are designed to work out each finger in your picking hand: thumb (represented by a p), index finger (represented by an i), middle finger (represented by an m) and ring finger (represented by an a). The letters p-i-m-a represent the Spanish word for each finger, which originates from early Spanish guitar pieces.
Most of the time, I like to assign my thumb to pluck the g-string and C-string of the ukulele (top two strings), index finger to the E-string and middle finger to the A-string (bottom string). However, sometimes it works best to assign each finger to a string. This means, the thumb plucks the g-string (top string), the index finger the C-string, the middle finger the E-string and the ring finger the A-string (bottom string).
When plucking the strings of the ukulele, for the most balanced sound, aim to pluck the string with the part of your finger where the flesh of your finger meets the fingernail. If you pluck more with the nail, you get a brighter more lively tone, and if you pluck more with the flesh of your fingers, you get a softer, warmer tone.
If you’ve never fingerpicked the ukulele before, it can be a bit awkward at first. Be patient with yourself and avoid the impulse to smash your ukulele up against a brick wall because your fingers need time to build up some strength and independence from one another. Each of the following arpeggio exercises makes use of different fingers to help you do exactly this!
‘P i m’ arpeggio exercises
To play an arpeggio, pluck individual notes of a chord in a repeating pattern with your picking hand. After plucking each note, allow it to ring out as long as possible until plucking the string again.
These first few arpeggios use your thumb, index and middle fingers in varying orders. Each arpeggio is played in groups of three notes, so play these patterns in an eighth note triplet rhythm counting: 1 – trip – let, 2 – trip – let, etc.
The next two exercises alternate your thumb between plucking the top two strings.
‘P i m a’ arpeggio exercises
Now add in the use of your ring finger (represented by an a). These exercises are a bit more difficult because the ring finger isn’t known to be the strongest finger in your hand. Use these exercises to build up strength and to free up movement in your ring finger.
The last three exercises eliminate the use of your thumb and focus on working out your index, middle and ring fingers.
Practice tip: In these exercises, you switch between just a C and G7 chord. For more practice, write out your own chord progressions and practice these arpeggios while switching between other different chords.
Dionisio Aguado’s “25 Pieces Pour Guitare, no. 17”
The cool thing about arpeggios is that they are used quite often in classical and Spanish guitar pieces to play beautiful and intricate-sounding fingerpicking pieces. When these pieces are arranged for ukulele, they are really fun to play and sound quite impressive.
Aguado’s 25 Pieces Pour Guitare, no. 17 is played solely on the bottom three strings of the ukulele. Use either a constant p-i-m or i-m-a arpeggio to play the piece. Try your hand at playing this piece!
To take it to the next level, compose your own intricate fingerpicking piece by coming up with your own chord progressions and using an arpeggio to play the chords. You might even experiment with using moveable chord shapes across the ukulele fretboard to get more interesting tones out of what would be really common chords.
I’ve been waiting ages for an excuse to do a Johnny Cash song that isn’t Folsom Prison or Ring of Fire. So James Clem covering one of my favourite Cash songs is all the excuse I need.
There are a few tricky moves in the chords. But you can simplify it by using F7 in the place of Ab and use the open shape of C7.
Suggested Strumming
A lot of left-hand muting in this one. Here’s a pattern you can use most of the way through:
