When I did my ukulele scales posts there were a few people who didn’t have a clue what it was all about. So, I thought I’d go back to basics and cover it from there.

The most common scale in all music is the major scale. You’ll hear it all over the place (pretty much every nursery rhyme, Christmas carol and national anthem uses it) and it’s the basis of all chords.

The major scale creates a particular pattern on the ukulele. This pattern can be moved up and down the neck depending on which key you play in.

C Major Scale

The most important note to concentrate on is the root note – the first one played and the last one played. For example, The C major scale starts on the open C string and ends on the A string, third fret. The pattern looks like this on the fretboard:

The tab looks like this:

And sounds like this:

There are lots of ways you can use the major scale. One is for improvising a solo. In the following snippet, I’m improvising a little melody with the chords C, F and G and using only notes in the major scale pattern.

D Major Scale

For the D major scale, you use exactly the same pattern but start on a D note (C string second fret) and end on a D note (A string, fifth fret). Giving you this:

F Major Scale

Moving that pattern up and down the fretboard will give you a major scale wherever you use it. Whichever key you want to play the major scale in, find that note on the C string and start the pattern from there.

For example, to get the F major scale, you start the scale pattern on the fifth fret of the c string which gives you this pattern:

This tab:

And sounds like this:

Love Shack has to be one of the funnest songs there has ever been. The guitar part is played mostly on the top three strings and above the fifth fret, so it fits perfectly on the uke.

There are two main parts in the song. The first is the verse part which alternates between C and Bb. The rhythm of it varies throughout, but the basis of it is this:

Verse Midi

The most important thing is to keep the chord stabs short and funky. Do this by releasing the pressure on your fretting hand soon after strumming (but leave them touching the string). The only time you let the strummed chords ring is when you’re sliding them.

The chorus part is simply strummed chords. I play them all with down strums. After the chorus is my favorite part. It requires you to bend the E string up (by pushing it towards your head). I’ve tabbed it as being bent by half a step (so it sounds one fret higher than it actually is), but you don’t have to be that accurate in this case – it’s more important to get that little rasp into it.

Chorus Midi

Requested by Jeff.

The Darlings – Emily (MP3) via WeePOP!
Elizabeth Darling – I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend (MP3)
Elizabeth Darling – Oh No! Another Email From You! (MP3) via her website.

It’s a tough job being a songwriter these days. A good 90% of songs are about getting together and splitting up and you can’t write an honest, story song about either of those anymore without including email, texts, MySpace, Facebook etc. But the pop song has really moved beyond letters and phonecalls. Any reference to more modern means of communication is open to ridicule (such as from Bill Bailey at about 5:40). The only song that comes to mind that includes texting without sounding contrived is The Arctic Monkeys’ The View from the Afternoon. All of which is a roundabout way of me saying I like Elizabeth Darling’s songs.

The first I heard of Elizabeth Darling was when WeePOP! released The Darlings’Photo EP. The EP has sold out but you can still download Emily and stream officially the best ukulele AC/DC here. They’ve since changed their name to Allo Darlin’ (probably due to the fact there are 6,000 bands called The Darlings) and Elizabeth has been putting up a bunch of demos on her website which are some of the best ukulele-pop songs I’ve ever heard.

Allo Darlin’ MySpace

Where can I go without my ukulele? In tribute to the classic broken ukulele sketch, here are the chords to the Sesame Street theme tune.

The tune starts off with a bit of blues shuffle which goes like this:

All the strums are down strums apart from the next to last one in the second and fourth bars.

I prefer to make it more hardcore and bluesy like this:

For the “…tell me how to get…” part you can just play F7 and G. But I like to double the melody like this:

Requested by Artifus.

I think I should probably change the name now that YouTube have stolen it. Anyhoo, this week I was really impressed with Jake Wildwood. He’s put a whole load of old timey uke and non-uke videos up this week. You can download all his albums for free on his website.

The Barnkickers – One Less Tear Read the rest of this entry »

A question to anyone who has ever played a harp ukulele, does that extra bit make any difference to the sound? I suspect the sound is rather besides the point since they look so great. Black Bear have come up with a great looking Concert Harp ukulele.

Another question: Does anyone know anything about Hudson ukuleles? They’ve been all over eBay UK. All being sold by the same seller (whose website you can visit here). They remind me of Kala ukuleles. Compare the Hudson HUK-SMC to the Kala KA-SC.

The Ukuleliana section of Buy a Ukulele has to be my favourite. There’s always some strange and wonderful junk in their (between the hula dolls and Lilo & Stitch stuff). Some of the photos are just great: chimp with uke, Oliver Hardy with uke, women with ukes, sailors with ukes. My favourite of them all, despite it being mislabeled ‘ukulele’, is this one. I’d love to know why the dapper gent on the left has a yo-yo.

Technical difficulties abound: It looks like there are a few problems with the RSS feed updating. The emails and the feed itself seem to be fine. If you resubscribe by clicking here, it does return the latest posts (hopefully). Also, there was a problem with the tab and chords page in Internet Explorer and now all the tabs and chords are on one page.

Just one day left to enter ukulele for sale contest. But still plenty of time to enter my Review Your Ukulele competition to win a Kala Pineapple.

There’s still work to do on it, but as of now the Buy a Ukulele section of the site is officially open. It’s been prettified and has a load of reviews of various ukuleles (gosh, a lot of people have Lanikai ukuleles).

If you can’t wait until Friday for your ukulele news fix, you should follow Ukulele Hero. He covers everything ukulele related on the web (and I mean everything).

YouTube had a front page covered in ukulele videos earlier this week, along with Ukulala on the YouTube blog and Aldrine on the LA Times blog.

Join JoCo on stage in NYC and uke-out.

Rush’s Closer to the Heart on Uker Tabs.

MP3s: Frekvens has Thos Henley, Stop Okay Go has Mareva Galanter’s version of Bang, Bang, Hero Hill has The Burning Hell and Popsense has Mirah‘s Engine Heart.

UOoGB on the Beeb next Tuesday and Saturday. (Thanks to both Garys for that).

Worst film review ever: “Mad Dog Time should be cut into free ukulele picks for the poor.”

Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly’s recent ukulele session for Le Soir featured a cover of Justice’s D.A.N.C.E. and it was a bit of a cracker. The requests came in and here it is.

The first thing you’ll have to do to play this is to start attacking the tuning pegs. He’s in a tuning that I’ve never come across before: A, B, F#, B. That’s a D-tuning with the D string tuned down three frets to B giving an open B7 tuning. But even that’s not exactly right as he’s tuned a little flat as well.

Once you’ve got that done, the intro goes like this:

The chords for the verse are a simplified version of the intro. It’s very sparse, just the two B strings open with a descending note on the F# string.

The chorus opens up the sound a little by adding a note on top of those chords.

Note the five at the side of the first chord. That means that the chord diagram starts at the fifth fret (so you are fretting at the fifth and seventh frets).

When you’re strumming these, keep a steady up down rhythm going. You can create a funky, syncopated effect by muting some of the strums (covering the strings with you left hand fingers so that the strings just produce a click when you play them).

If you don’t want to mess with the tuning too much, you could just tune the C-string down three frets to A and capo at the second fret (or just play it in the key of A).

If you are desperate to keep the ukulele in C tuning, you could play the intro like this:

Requested by Cardboardfrog and ukulellama.

The second in the ‘What ukulele do they play?’ series. The good news: if you want to play the same ukuleles as Zach Condon, you won’t have to spend anywhere near as much as if you wanted Jake Shimabukuro’s ukulele. They’re actually fairly bog-standard ukuleles, not that expensive and would be a good choice for beginners.

He seems to have two main stage ukuleles:

Bushman Jenny

Irrefutable evidence. Looks to me like a BU7TV.

Lanikai

Irrefutable evidence. Looks to me like an LU-21T.

Other ukuleles he’s been spotted with:

Fluke: On the set of the video for Elephant Gun he Postcards from Italy on the Fluke that’s featured in the video.

Samick: In this photoshoot. It’s the only time I’ve seen him with a Samick, so I don’t think it’s a regular player of his. It looks like a UK70.

Beirut Ukulele Tab and Chords

UPDATE: YouTube are featuring ukulele videos today. And totally stealing my shit.

More Canadian ukulele. Basia Bulat’s debut album, Oh, My Darling, kicks of with this short and sweet ukulele ditty.

The intro is pretty simple. You’re just playing the G,C and E strings open and sliding down the A string.

A similar thing is played during the outro but with triplets and an F chord making this a bit trickier.

I think it’s being played with a pick, so no fancy triplet strums. Each triplet is down, up, down which means you’ve got two down strokes next to each other.

UPDATE: TheAquaticSloth has video tutorial for Before I Knew here.