You may have noticed this is my seventh post in the space of six hours. It’s all part of the overhaul of the site that will be taking place soon.

With over 1,000 blog posts on Uke Hunt and a bunch more in the other sections, it’s getting impossible for people to find what they’re looking for. So these posts are designed to guide people towards the stuff that they’ll find most useful.

The first set of ‘lessons’ are divided by difficulty with a couple more focusing on styles (fingerpicking – which needs a bit of filling – and blues).

If you’ve got a suggestion for a section or something that should be included in a section, let me know in the comments.

For Beginners

Learn:

– How to read chord charts.
– Songs using only basic chords.
– Strumming technique.
– Essential equipment.

Click here for beginner lessons.

For Improvers

Learn:

– Barre chords.
– Songs with more jazzy chords.
– How to get a good sound.

Click here for improver lessons.

For Intermediates

Learn:

– To read tab.
– Useful licks.
– Guitar riffs for ukulele.
– Scales.

Click here for intermediate lessons.

For Advanced Players

Learn:

– Advanced techniques.
– To combine single notes and accompaniment.
– How to make your own arrangements.
– Fingertwisting tunes.

Click here for advanced lessons.

Blues Lessons

Learn:

– Blues scales.
– Blues licks and riffs.
– Solo blues tunes.

Click here for blues ukulele lessons.

Fingerpicking Lessons

Learn:

– Basic fingerpicking technique.
– Fingerpicking tunes.

Click here for fingerpicking lessons.

A few posts to help you get going with one of the most popular non-traditional ways to play the ukulele.

For this section you’ll need a good understand of ukulele tab.

Step 1: Basics

Blues Scales:

– Minor pentatonic scale
– Blues scale

Five steps to blues mastery

How to Play Blues Ukulele – ebook covering blues licks, riffs and soloing.

Step 2: Blues Riffs

Mannish Boy
Cream – Sunshine of Your Love

Step 3: Robert Johnson

They’re Red Hot
Walkin’ Blues
Come On In My Kitchen

Step 4: Blues Tunes

Neal Paisley – Gossip
Mississippi Blues

Extra Credit: Bored of using your fingers? Check out How to Play Slide Ukulele for a new perspective.

Fingerpicking Basics

Fingerpicking First Steps

Easy Fingerpicking

Playing one note at a time.

Stephin Merritt – Smile
Earlyguard – Busy Bee
Silent Night
Oh Christmas Tree

Moderate Fingerpicking

Introducing chords and melody notes.

Hawaii Five-O
Indiana Jones
Super Mario Theme
Godfather Theme

Tricky Fingerpicking

Introduction to campanella playing

You can use the campanella technique to play tunes like these:

John King – Larry O’Gaff
Sigur Ros – Hoppipolla
Baby Elephant Walk
Davy Graham – Angi
Upstairs, Downstairs Theme
Avett Brothers – Murder in the City

Once you’ve got to grips with the tabs in the intermediate section, it’s time to move up to playing some full tunes.

Step 1: New Tabs and Techniques

Strum blocking
Fingering and repeats
Advanced strums and rhythms
Hammer-ons and pull-offs
Slides
Advanced repeats, accents and trills
Vibrato, grace notes and bends
String bending tips

Extra Credit: Harmonics on a ukulele

Step 2: Full Tune Tabs

Theme tunes to films, games and TV shows provide a great test for your tab playing abilities and give your something instantly recognisable to play for friends and family.

Indiana Jones
Super Mario Theme
Godfather Theme
Good the Bad and the Ugly
The Office

Extra Credit: Get more tab arrangements for more popular instrumentals in the ebooks How to Play National Anthems and How to Play Ukuleles for Peace.

Step 3: Make your own arrangements

Once you’ve got the hang of other people’s arrangements of tunes, have a go at making your own.

– Here’s my tutorial for While My Guitar Gently Weeps in the hopes that you’ll work up your own rather than apeing Jake’s.
– Combining melody and chords.

Extra Credit: Learn how to read sheet music to expand your repetoire.

Step 4: Finger Twisters

Tricky tabs:

Sigur Ros – Hoppipolla
Sailors’ Hornpipe
In the Mood
Penguin Cafe Orchestra – Music for a Found Harmonium
James Bond Theme (difficult version)

More tricky ukulele tabs

Nightmare tabs:

Iron and Wine – Naked As We Came
Nick Drake – Cello Song
Radiohead – Street Spirit

More Nightmare tabs

Extra Credit: Check out John King’s Classical Ukulele, Mark Nelson’s Fingerstyle Solos for ‘Ukulele and my ebook http://howtoplayukulele.com/how-to-play-classical-ukulele/ for some fingerpicking challenges.

The improver section will have set you up with some serious chops. Now it’s time to start digging into tab and really showing off.

Step 1: Learn to Read Tab

– Frets and Strings
– Rhythm
– First ukulele tabs. A few short and simple but highly effective bits of tab:

WIUO – It’s A Heartache Introduction
Postcards from Italy Introduction
Kings of Leon/WIUO – The Bucket
Black Sabbath – Iron Man

Extra Credit: Follow the fingerpickinng lessons.

Step 2: Useful Licks

Hawaiian turnaround
Outros
Essential snippets to amuse your friends.

Extra Credit: Play a bunch of blues licks, riffs and solos in the How to Play Blues Ukulele ebook.

Step 3: Thumb-Only Tunes

Tabs for tunes that combine melody and chords but can all be played with just your thumb on the picking hand. So you can concentrate on the fretting hand without having to worry about complicated picking.

Patsy Cline/Willie Nelson – Crazy
Pua Lililehua
Waltzing Matilda
Christmas Time is Here
Whiskey in the Jar

Extra Credit: Get more tab arrangements for more popular instrumentals in the ebooks How to Play Christmas Ukulele, Christmas Ukulele 2 and

Step 4: Theory

– Learn some scales:

Minor scales
Major scale
Minor pentatonic scale
Blues scale

– How I work out chords
– Playing slash chords on the ukulele

Extra Credit: Harmonizing a melody

Step 5: Get a Solid Ukulele

Once you’ve reaching this stage in your ukulele playing, you’ll have put in many hours of practice. Before you get much further it’s time to get yourself a really nice, solid-top ukulele. Ohana and Kala both have solid ukuleles at affordable prices. If you budget stretches a bit further, take a look at KoAloha and Pono.

Now head to the advanced section and prepare to blow people’s mind with your mad-skills.

If you think there’s a post that deserves a link here or have a topic you’d like me to cover in this section, leave a comment.

Following on from the beginner lessons, you’re rocking through the easy chords, have your strumming down and learnt some fundamentals. In this section we’ll kick it up a notch with some more advanced chords.

Step 1: Barre Chords

– Barre chord playing tips
– Barre chords and inversions
– Songs with barre chords:

Ingrid Michaelson – You and I
Creep
I Heart You Online
Death Cab for Cutie – I Will Follow You Into the Dark

Step 2: Polish Up Your Technique

– Get good tone
– 10 ways to play an E chord – get to grips with the most loathed chord on the ukulele.

Step 3: Learn Some Jazzy Chords

Songs with fancy diminished chords, 6 chords and other oddities:

Flight of the Conchords – Mermaids
Priscilla Ahn – Way Back Home
Sophie Madeleine – Take Your Love with Me
Erika Eigen – I Want to Marry a Lighthouse Keeper

Extra Credit: Learn the fundamentals of chords, which chords go together and why in my ebook How to Play Ukulele Chord Progressions.

Step 4: Make Sure You’ve Got a Decent Uke

To get this far you’ve shown some dedication. If, like me, you started on a really crappy ukulele, you’ve earned yourself a nice uke. Kala make some nice ukuleles and Lanikai both make good ukuleles at reasonable prices.

By now you’ve probably read quite a bit about the ukulele so take a look at ten things you hear about the ukulele that might be bollocks.

Now you’ve got your chord chops down head over to the intermediate section to get stuck into tabs.

If you think there’s a post that deserves a link here or have a topic you’d like me to cover in this section, leave a comment.

You’ve just got your hands on a ukulele (or are just thinking of buying one). Here are a few things to read and songs to play that’ll get you up to speed quickly.

Step One: Learn the basics

– So You’ve Just Got Your First Ukulele – a free PDF I put together for beginners including essential links, first chords, tips and links to suggestions for the first songs to learn.
– 10 Things I Wish I’d Known About Ukuleles (Before I Bought One) – Don’t make the same mistakes I did.
– 10 Tips for Ukulele Beginners
– How to read chord charts.

Extra Credit: Ukulele for Dummies – The (paper) book I wrote covering all the ukulele basics from buying your first uke, to strumming, chord shapes and far beyond.

Step 2: Get Your Strum On

– Ukulele Strumming for Dummies
– Strumming notation
– 13 Most Useful Strumming Patterns

Extra Credit: – How to Play Ukulele Strums – An ebook I wrote covering all the strumming and rhythm essentials for beginners.

Step 3: Play Some Songs

Check out the Songs with Chords You Know Post

Some popular ones:

– Somewhere Over the Rainbow
– I Wanna Be Like You
– Hallelujah
– 5 Years Time
– Sentimental Heart

Extra Credit: Joan Jett – Bad Reputation – Easy chords but you’ll need to have your chord changes down and a strong strumming-hand to play it up to speed.

Step 4: Spend Some Money

– A ukulele tuner
– Some good strings like Aquila.

Extra Credit: Keep your ukulele upright with a stand. Get a capo to make playing in other keys easier.

Congratulations! You’re no longer a noob. You can now advance to the improver section.

If you think there’s a post that deserves a link here or have a topic you’d like me to cover in this section, leave a comment.

Since his arrangement of In the Mood, I’ve been looking forward to seeing what David would come up with next and I wasn’t disappointed. His version of Mississippi Blues has plenty of bluesy licks. And he was kind enough to let me share the arrangement here.

Subscribe to David on YouTube

More from David:

The Stripper
In the Mood
If I Had You
The Whistling Milkman

As far as I’m concerned, the UOGB’s performance at the Proms is the high-water mark of the ukulele revival (so far).

If you’re not familiar with the Proms, they’re a series of straight classical music concerts that have been held at the Royal Albert Hall for the last 115 years and culminate in a display of chinlessness and nostalgic faux-nationalism at the Last Night of the Proms. They’re about as establishment as you can get. So having the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain play at the Proms is similar to the Queen breaking out an Abbott Monarch for a rendition of Five Foot Two.

If you hadn’t guessed from the last paragraph, I’m not much of a fan of the Proms. They represent a staid, backward-looking, elitist side of Britain. Which begs two questions: Who the hell put the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain on the bill? And why was I so pleased they were part of it?

Part of why I enjoyed it is that the music feels slightly homemade. The Ukes are good musicians but they’re certainly not virtuosi. George quotes of one fan’s response to his fears of not getting all the notes right, “We don’t come to your concert to see you get the notes right.” No matter how big they get, there’s still a sense that they’re one of us. Playing inappropriate tunes on the ukulele just for the fun of it.

And that idea reaches its natural conclusion with 1,000 audience members playing along with Ode to Joy. Anyone watching that hoping to hear the right notes is going to come away disappointed. But the sight of 1,000 people cheering and waving out-of-tune ukuleles feels like a vindication of everyone who has picked up an instrument (or a paintbrush, or knitting needle or a saw) and decided that making their own entertainment was more important than switching on the telly to watch someone competent.

Is should probably talk about the DVD itself. If you want a proper write-up, I highly recommend you read Acilius’s review. He asked a question: “Is it really worth paying £15.00 plus postage?” His answer was an emphatic yes. Mine is a bit more circumspect. It’s a must buy for anyone who, like me, wants to own a bit of ukulele history and UOGB completists. But people who just want a flavour of the Ukes would be better off with Live in London #1 and #2.

Buy Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain Prom Night on their website.

I think this tune has to be the most overused piece of music on television: reality shows, sporting montages, documentaries. And now it’s been covered by the guy off of G4. That would usually be enough to kill off any song. But this song is so magnificent it gives me goosebumps every time I hear it.

For the uke arrangement I’ve moved everything up a fret from the original to the more uke-friendly key of C. The first half of tune is all played campanella style (i.e. one note per string letting them ring into each other). I know a lot of people don’t like this way of playing but, screw it, it’s easily the best way of arranging a tune like this.

The most important thing to get right is the dynamics (quiet and louds bits). The original gets this one spot on. Obviously you’re not going to have the same dynamic range as a full band and a string section. But try to let the music swell in the first half and blossom in the second half. The dynamics are what gives emotion to the tune.

Another important thing to get right – which I completely failed to do in the video – is to keep an even tempo. I speed up much too fast towards the end. So do as I say not as I do.