Because of my anti-football prejudice, I’d never considered tabbing this out before. With the final of Euro 2008 today (that’s soccerball to you North Americans), I thought it would be fitting and, blow me down, it could have been written for the ukulele. It also makes for a great football tune medley when it’s followed by Stars and Stripes Forever (AKA ‘Ere We Go).
Most of it is fairly simple strumming. The trickiest bits are the places where you switch from strumming to fingerpicking and the jump up to the third fret. But it’s well worth practicing (if you’re British at least).
There have been three Jupiter Creek ukuleles crop up on eBay this week. The baritone has gone already, but you still have a shot at a concert and a tenor. There’s also a soprano for sale on eBay France.
It’s not often you see RISAs on eBay, but there’s a Meltocaster on there right now. It’s a guitarlele rather than a uke, though. And I still can’t quite come to terms with that shape.
The RISA isn’t the only strangely shaped ukulele on eBay at the moment. There are ukes shaped like a biscuit tin (strangely inelegant for a Lyon and Healy ukulele), a teardrop (I’m pretty sure that’s also a Lyon and Healy: a Venetian ukulele) and, best of all, an aeroplane.
It’s not often that there’s a ukulele I’m lusting after more than one shaped like an aeroplane, but this week that’s the case. MGM has a James Hill Signature JSM-2 ukulele up for sale right now (made by G String). I can always kid myself that if I had one, I’d play just like James Hill and no one can prove otherwise.
There’s a banjo ukulele collector who’s selling off his collection on eBay UK. There’s a Gibson UB3, a Maybell, a Bruno (made by Harmony ukuleles and an Avalon. All look very well cared for.
“lately all I do is talk about my ukulele, but I honestly love it more than life. sometimes I just hold it to my heart and sigh because I love it so. I think maybe I’ll be a good mother if I love an instrument this much?” Quote from probably the coolest girl on the planet.
YouTube’s little ukulele video feature made me reassess this song. I’d skipped over it fairly quickly the first time round – there are a lot of ukulele videos to watch – but I shouldn’t have, it’s a damn fine song (no such change of heart over Where Your Scar Is though) and it’s already inspired its own ukulele tribute parody.
For this song Lauren and Lena are tuned to DGBE: baritone/guitar tuning – five frets lower than the standard ukulele tuning. Other than that, the chords are pretty easy. Much easier than they make them look.
When I did my ukulele scalesposts 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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
