As well as his classical and traditional tab book, Wilfried Welti has also put together an ebook of German Christmas carols. Some of these – such as O, Tannenbaum and Stille Nacht – are very familiar outside of Germany. Some of them are less recognisable – such as Ihr Kinderlein Kommet (O Come, Little Children). Others are entirely new to me but have great tunes such as Lieb Nachtigall. All of them are beautifully and simply arranged for the uke.

UPDATE: Wilfried has a new Christmas ebook available Christmas Music with the Ukulele. It’s even better than this one!

Visit Wilfried Welti’s YouTube channel.

Incredibly irritating to song to go through sober, but the big advantage of it is that all the numbers from 12 to 6 just require one strum of a D chord.

The best bit, obviously, is the ‘FIVE GOLDEN RIIIIIIIINGS’. I like to beef that part up a bit with these chords:

I also like to add bits of the melody into the chord accompaniment as well. And a solo version in this key is, handily enough, in my How to Play Christmas Ukulele ebook.

There are two different versions of the D chord in the chart: one with an open A string and one with the A string at the fifth fret. But you can use just one of them the whole way through if you’re not comfortable with either. I’m going to have to come up with a better way of referring to different inversions of a chord than calling it ‘alt’, let me know because there must be one. Perhaps calling it D, D’, D”. Let me know your suggestions.

Requested by Annie

This work by Ukulele Hunt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I find most Christmas songs unbearably bad. The only type of Christmas songs I love are the old Pagan ones that have had a thin layer of Christianity papered on top (much like Christmas itself) and one of the best, Down in Yon Forest, crops up on the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain’s new Christmas album. A quick lyric sample: “In the bed there lays a knight / Whose wounds do bleed by day and night / Under that bed there runs a flood / The one half runs water the other runs blood.” … and a Happy New Year.

But there’s plenty of jollity on the album as well along with a bunch of lyric changing that I’m dying to quote here and entirely ruin for you. These humorous, singalongs are enhanced by being recorded live while the more intricate songs are recorded in the studio.

But the highlight of the album for me is – as you might expect – the top notch uke playing. Their instrumental version of Wassail is a masterclass in arranging for a ukulele group – everywhere you look there’s something interesting going on and it still works as a whole – and Christmas Rose is a beautifully played waltz. They use the uke in some interesting ways; the album opens with sleigh bells imitated by playing the strings behind the nut. The uke playing highlight of the album is the album closer: a funky-ass version of Good King Wenceslas. The intro is incredible. I don’t know how they manage to build those up.

You can buy Christmas with the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain and listen to extracts here.
And The Ukes will be turning up on Colin Murray‘s Christmas Show on Radio 1 on the 22nd December (who has some mad ukulele skillz himself).

Let It Snow (Chords)

Does this count as a Christmas song? No mention of Christmas, but it seems to have become one anyway. It’s been covered by hundreds – most notably Frank Sinatra – but the chords for this one are heavily based on my new favourite version by Jodi Matthews and Dan Sargraves.

I’m a bit slow off the mark with Florence and the Machine. The song isn’t particularly uke heavy (and I’m still not 100% convinced that it even is a uke) but I love the song, so it’s here. Also this week is a duet between Seeso and Ukulelezo bursting with sexual tension, Ken Middleton covering a song from my favourite EP of the year and plenty more.

Florence and the Machine – Dog Days are Over

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A bit hard to find the interesting ukuleles this week and eBay is bulging with Christmas present ukes. musicguymic alone has 214 Kala ukuleles up for sale and also a ‘blowout’ on Koa Pili Kokos. But his most intriguing lot is a set of three Nunes style ukuleles by William King.

Not long left to bid on this Celtic Fluke. I would have thought that someone would have snapped it up on a Buy It Now a long time ago.

A couple of different eras of Disney ukuleles: Mousekulele and High School Musical ukulele.

You might know I’m very fond of my Ashbury Concert Koa, so I’m quite tempted to buy a spruce version and give it a light skinned brother.

There’s this strange ukulele on eBay France. You can get a clearer idea of what it looks like, on the maker’s website. And it looks like the French have the coolest ukulele instruction books and CDs.

Ukulele photo of the week. Why did the single curl of hair go out of fashion? That look is hot.

Plenty of Christmas ukulele kitsch around. Ukulele Christmas baubles like this and this are fair enough, but Ukulele Santa salt and pepper shakers?

The next How to Play Ukulele ebook should be released next week. It’s a little different from my usual releases as I’m not the only person involved. It’s a kind of Live-Aid-for-Ukulele-Tabbers with all proceeds from the ebook going directly to Ukuleles for Peace. It contains tabs by Dominator, James Hill (yes, THE James Hill), Ken Middleton, Mark Kailana Nelson, Wilfried Welti and me. For once I can say it’s absolutely fantastic without feeling like I’m being boastful. I’ve been loving playing these tabs myself (and I got them free – which is the only reason I started the project in the first place). So make sure you don’t miss the launch next week (hopefully).

The first edition of Ukulele Player Magazine is up for download and includes interviews with Craig Robertson and Amber ‘Ukebucket’ Nash.

IZ’s uke in the Grammy Museum.

Get uke chords on your iPhone

The Duke of Uke blog has started putting up tabs and chords, starting with Babooshka.

More art ukes.

MFM has an MP3 of Florence and the Machine’s cover of Postcards from Italy.

Tony Danza pulled out his Flea for a quick song on Fox News. The only clip I could find was the snippet at the end of this video.

Frank Skinner’s continuing uke obsession: “It drives my girlfriend crazy. I sit up for hours watching instruction videos on the net after she’s gone to bed. But at least I’ve branched out on what kind of videos I’m watching online late at night. ”

Michael Leviton’s The Beach Gets Cold on Uker Tabs. And I’ve finally got round to listing the Uker Tabs contributions on the Ukulele Chords and Tabs page.

Friday Timewaster: Stick Cricket.

If the credit crunch is biting, try selling off your used MP3s (according to Idolator it isn’t a joke).

If they really loved the ukulele, they wouldn’t write songs in the key of E.

But I’ll forgive them that because this is a super-cute song with a hilarious video (by Ballard C Boyd who is due a new ukulele Christmas album pretty soon).

To combat the E problem, I’ve shifted everything up fret. So if you want to play it in the original key, tune down half a step.

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Christmas is coming and time to dust off a few party tricks, so here’s a list of all last years’ Christmas ukulele tabs and chords. More to come this year.

Christmas Ukulele Tabs

Jingle Bells
Rudolph the Red Nosed Raindeer
Mele Kalikimaka
White Christmas

And there’s also my How to Play Christmas Ukulele ebook with solo ukulele tabs for 12 Christmas songs (released last Christmas).

Christmas Ukulele Chords

Eartha Kitt – Santa Baby
The Pogues – Fairytale of New York
The Ramones – Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want To Fight)
Sarah Silverman – Give the Jew Girl Toys
Slade – Merry Xmas Everybody

Can’t Keep is my favourite of Eddie Vedder’s ukulele songs. It’s quite unusual for a ukulele song and sounds far better and more aggressive than the full band, album version.

For this song he’s at least in tune with himself, if not the rest of the world (perhaps some clever metaphor). But if you want to play along with the video, you’ll have to tune down very slightly.

The riff of the song works very well on the uke. It starts out like this:

And shifts a little for the verse to this:

The strumming for these sections is just up, down (a lot). He switches it up a bit for the ‘I won’t live forever…’ bit. Down, down, up, up, down should get you through that.