Christmas is coming fast and it’s time to start practicing a few tunes to entertain the family. With John King’s Classical Ukulele and Famous Solos and Duets for ‘Ukulele being the two best ukulele tab books around and his arrangements of Carol of the Bells and What Child Is This? being great, I felt pretty safe picking up a copy of his Christmas Carols for Ukulele.

Lowdown

Melody in standard notation only and ukulele chord diagrams (NO TAB) for:

Angels We Have Heard On High
Away In A Manger
Coventry Carol
Deck The Hall
The First Noel
Go, Tell It On The Mountain
God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen
Good King Wenceslas
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing
Here We Come A-Wassailing
I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day
It Came Upon The Midnight Clear
Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring
Jingle Bells
Joy To The World
O Christmas Tree
O Come, All Ye Faithful (Adeste Fideles)
O Come, O Come Immanuel
O Holy Night
O Little Town Of Bethlehem
Silent Night
Toyland
Up On The Housetop
We Three Kings Of Orient Are
We Wish You A Merry Christmas
What Child Is This?

The Good Stuff

Erm…: I’m assuming this book is aimed at people who just want chords to some traditional Christmas songs. It fulfills that purpose.

It’s cheap: £5 on Amazon and $8 on Elderly.

The Not So Good Stuff

No tab: That makes it either useless or a huge chore to use to at least 90% of ukulele players.

Boring arrangements: If you could call them that at all. There are so many ways to play the same notes on a ukulele that standard notation doesn’t cut it. If you’re expecting anything like his other books, you’ll be very disappointed.

No audio: It doesn’t give you any idea of how it’s supposed to sound.

No performance notes: John King’s writing is as good as his arranging. None of it here.

Overall

The information on this book online is very scant. I was expecting something completely different given John King’s other books. I was very disappointed with it (a shame to say that about somethig that John King has put his name to). Definitely one to avoid. It seems to have been thrown together to make a few quid at Christmas. If you’re looking for chords and melody for these public domain Christmas tunes you can find them all over the net.

I’ve been patiently waiting to put this one up since seeing this video starring ‘thingamy off of Heroes‘ and ‘was he the one who was in My Name Is Earl once?’ I don’t know why they uploaded in January. Anyhoo, eleven months later it’s finally December and I can post it without it seeming a bit weird.

Twiddly Bit

For the intro you’re using the same chords as the song and hitting the E and A strings with an up strum with your index finger and the down strums on the g and C strings with your thumb.

Suggested Strumming

For most of the song she’s using that same picking pattern. But if you want to keep it simple just a down, up, down, up… strum will see you through fine.

You can download this song free on their website.

Buy Garfunkel and Oates on iTunes

More Kate Micucci

Kate Micucci Interview
Garfunkel and Oates – You, Me and Steve
Kate Micucci and William H Macy – It’s Time to Get Laid
Let Us Be Happy Together
Mr Moon
Screw You
Dear Deer

A quick round up of the past two years’ worth of Christmas tabs and chords:

12 Days of Christmas (Chords)
All I Want for Christmas Is You (Chords and Tab)
Fairytale of New York (Chords)
Give the Jew Girl Toys (Chords)
German Christmas Carols (Tab)
Jingle Bells (Tabs)
Let It Snow (Chords)
Mele Kalikimaka (Tabs)
Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want To Fight) (Chords)
Merry Xmas Everybody (Chords)
Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree (Chords)
Rudolph the Red Nosed Raindeer (Tabs)
Santa Baby (Chords)
Silent Night (Tab)
White Christmas (Chords)
White Christmas (Tab)
Winter Wonderland
You’re a Mean One Mr Grinch

Obviously there’ll be more stuff this year. Some of the stuff I’ve got lined up: U900, Garfunkel and Oates, Zee Avi and Half Man Half Biscuit (about bloody time).

And don’t forget my Christmas ukulele tab ebook:

How to Play Christmas Ukulele

I’ve had a couple of half-hearted attempts at working up a version of this myself but never came up with anything that I thought really worked. Lucky for me, David nailed it and he’s kindly let me share the tab for his version with y’all.

Subscribe to David’s YouTube channel.

More from David:

The Stripper
Mississippi Blues
If I Had You
The Whistling Milkman

Videos this week from the mind-bending tUnE-YaRdS (and don’t miss FIYA from the same session), Miss Jess, Siri Nilsen (same song as last time but it’s too good), Nate Lieby (I strongly advise you close your eyes for 15 seconds at the 2:25 mark) and plenty more.

A lot of stuff I wanted to post this week – I’ve gone over my self imposed limit of ten and there were more I wanted to post. If you’re still gagging for more after these check out Kate Sloan, Wilfried Welti and The Corner Laughers (thanks to Ron Hale for that last one).

Read the rest of this entry »

We should definitely have Thanksgiving in the UK. How could we turn down a day of over eating? And a day of over spending afterwards? If you’re looking for a Black Friday deal, you can get 15% off at Guitar Center today (Friday) using the code BLACKFRIDAY. I think I’d use it to pick up an Ibanez quilted maple (they seem to using the spalted mango picture there).

Pono seem to be the ukulele of choice for musicians realising they need a better ukulele. Recent upgraders to Pono include Dent May, Amanda Palmer and Sophie Madeleine.

With guitar makers like Ibanez and Fender leaping on to the ukulele bandwagon, I thought Larivee might be returning to the fold. But they’ve gone and sold their koa wood to Kala.

Boat Paddle Resophonic.

Photos: <1910s ukuleles and hats, cowboy ukulele.

The Ukulele Festival of Great Britain is going to take place in Cheltenham on 19th and 20th June next year. The bill is rumored to include GUGUG, Uke Box and Ukulelezaza.

And staying in Great Britain, Jake Shimabukuro will be performing with Bette Midler at this year’s Royal Variety Performance.

John Kavanagh’s posthumous album Small Rooms has been released. You can find out more, listen to samples and buy it at JohnKavanagh.net

James Hill’s album True Love, Don’t Weep has won Traditional Album of the Year at the CFMAs.

New blogs from Aaron Keim and Ralph Shaw. Ralph has some excellent advice for getting kids interested in music, “Tip #8 If they do take up a musical instrument be sure to maintain a constant stream of negativity any time the subject comes up.”

Bosko and Honey launch their Ukulele Safari merch.

On Uker Tabs: Thom Yorke’s Cymbal Rush and Roy Smeck’s Tiger Rag

The old story of boy meets girl, boy blasts off into space, girl writes ukulele song slagging off boy.

Pictures: a bunch of exceptionally strange ukuleles (including Keith Ogata and Road Toad I think), Uni & her Ukelele & her Unicorn, The Shadow Shoots, Viva Cuba.

Make money writing about vintage ukuleles. Wait, why don’t I have a site about vintage ukuleles?

I regard myself as being pretty near unshockable when it comes to lyrics but I did have a ‘Can he say that?’ moment in this song (I won’t spoil it if you haven’t heard it yet).

I wasn’t expecting ukulele riffery from Jamie T but this is a damn fine bit of work. And quite tricky to work out – not sure how much use the G string is getting.

Verse

The tab is in D-tuning (aDF#B) or you could put a capo on the second fret.

Chorus

Not Twiddly Bits

In the, “Hustle and the bustle…” section the chords are:

Em G D

If you’re a regular on the blog, you’ll have noticed I’ve linked to quite a few of Jim D’Ville’s posts on Play Ukulele By Ear. His posts are always interesting and informative and I think ear training is essential for any musician. So when Jim was kind enough to send me a copy of his DVD on playing ukulele by ear I chucked in straight in the DVD player and got down to business.

The Lowdown

Play Ukulele by Ear is a 52 minute DVD introduction to musical intervals and using your ears to tune your ukulele and pick out chord progressions.

Chapters:
The C Tone
Tuning By Ear
C The Home Key
F The IV Chord
Chord Progressions
Intervals
Diatonic Chords

Price: $22 + $4 international shipping from Jim’s site or eBay.

The Good Stuff

Simply and Effectively Explained: Jim puts the information across in a very straight forward and effective manner. He’s obviously taught a lot of people this stuff before and knows what works.

No Prior Knowledge Needed: If you don’t have any knowledge of musical theory at all, you’ll still be able to follow along with the DVD and learn from it.

Interval Recognition: I think this is the strongest part of the DVD. Jim demonstates the sounds of different intervals and relates them to specific songs to help you recognise them more easily. And he has a great way of explaining the moods of the different chords in a I – IV – V progression to help you spot them in songs (and it’s very useful to be able to do that).

Interesting Titbits: Jim throws in plenty of interesting factoids such as harmonic resonance and ambulance sirens using 7th intervals.

The Beret: Every pro uker needs their trademark headgear and Jim now owns the beret.

The Not So Good Stuff

Filmed Lesson: The DVD is a filmed group lesson (although you don’t see the group apart from the occasional Fluke headstock invading the screen). It’s a bit disconcerting to watch because he’s looking everywhere but at the camera.

It’s a DVD: It’s just my personal preference and I know there are plenty who disagree – I’m probably in the minority – but I find it hard to learn effectively from DVDs. I can’t dash through the parts I understand already and it’s difficult to go over the bits I don’t grasp again. I find that DVDs/online videos are good at conveying an interest in the subject but I usually find I’ve forgotten everything by the next day. Probably a bad habit picked up from watching to much television.

It’s mostly down to my learning style. If yours is different, you might prefer a DVD.

Bringing it back to an actual review of this DVD in particular, I think it could do with being chopped into smaller sections to make it easier to find certain parts. There’s a lot of information on the DVD – too much to take in one go if it’s all new to you – so it would be useful to have smaller sections.

Overall

Play Ukulele by Ear is great for anyone who wants to know the basics of harmony and how to recognise intervals. By the end of it you’ll be able to spot a I – IV – V progression a mile off – which is worth the price of admission alone. But don’t expect it to turn you into an expert able to reel off tabs after one listen. If you’re already sound on the basics and looking to develop your ear to a more advanced level check out Ear Master.

Buy Play Ukulele by Ear on Jim’s site or eBay.

Here’s another top-notch song from Sophie Madeleine and another one for ukulele-tabs.com to steal (unless they made exactly the same screw ups with the passing chords I did). And they butcher the stuff they nick: they even keep the G’ notation in this which makes no sense since all their chord shapes are auto-generated.

Anyway, enough bitter ranting, on to the song.

Suggested Strumming

For the verses:

d – d u – u d u

For each chord except the last C in the verse.

For the middle do all down strums for the first two chords then d u D u d u D u for the next two.

(Not So) Twiddly Bits

For the intro you play the chords just the same as the verse but take your finger off the A string and play it open for the last strum on the C’, C5- and Csus4 chords.

Buy it on BandCamp and Rocky and Balls have released a charity song in aid of people with moustaches (I think).

Requested by Marcelo and Emily.

More Sophie Madeleine

Sophie Madeleine interview
Beard Song (Chords)
Rocky and Balls – I Heart You Online (Chords)
Take Your Love With Me (The Ukulele Song)(Chords)