Of all the ten commandments, the one I find most difficult to live by is, “Thy shalt not covet thy neighbour’s uke.” I’ve often found myself browsing eBay or YouTube, ogling the ukes of others and contemplating harvesting the organs of my uglier children to raise the cash to buy one. But my moral compass got the better of me. So how do you get a better sounding ukulele without shelling out for one?

1. Holding the ukulele

I’ve seen it suggested that you should hold the uke by smushing it into your chest; that is entirely the wrong way to go about it. Being so small, it’s easy to smother all the tone out of a ukulele. You want to be touching the ukulele as little as possible. You need to allow the front and back of the uke to vibrate as much as possible to wring all the tone and volume out of it as possible.

Watch how the masters like Jake Shimabukuro and Roy Smeck hold it. They have the uke angled away from the body and their forearm resting very gently on the corner of the uke. The area of the uke they are touching is very small and mostly limited to the corners.

2. Use good strings

The quality of strings you use can have a huge effect on the sound of the ukulele. Buying top of the range strings is far more affordable than buying a top of the range uke and can yield almost as much of an improvement in tone. Aquila and Worth strings are generally considered the best ukulele strings around. But I still love my pink KoAloha strings. Find more about ukulele strings here.

3. Find the sweet spot

The place where you strum the uke can have a big impact on how it sounds. If you strum close to the bridge (where the strings are tied on), then you’ll get a very thin, reedy sound. Each uke has it’s own sweet spot but it’s usually somewhere around the point where the neck meets the body.

4. Don’t use a guitar pick.

The number one mistake guitar players make when transferring to uke is hacking away at the uke strings with a thumping great rhino’s toenail. Guitar plectrums are far too hard for nylon uke strings (you can just about get away with it on steel strings) and as a consequence they make a harsh sound. If you have to use a pick, use the dedicated ukulele felt picks.

5. Look after your uke.

Ukes react very badly to humidity. If you’ve got a cheap instrument you may not want to fork out for a humidifier but don’t leave your uke on a sunny windowsill or near a heater. The latest edition of UkeCast (episode 222 – the number of a third of the beast) has a list of tips for looking after your uke (I did not know that suncream can damage ukuleles).

So you might not be able to make a Mahalo sound like a vintage Martin ukulele (that was just an excuse for a very tenuous pun) but you can certainly improve the sound it makes.

Do you have have any other tone tips?

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain‘s latest album, Precious Little, contains a version of this song (made famous by Nancy Sinatra’s version on the Kill Bill Soundtrack) but they’re not the first to do it on the uke. Former Miss France, Mareva Galanter did a ukulele version on her Ukuyeye album (which combined two of my musical loves that I never thought I’d see together) she also has the only flash website so cool it doesn’t make me run away and look at a blank sheet of paper for half an hour.

Ukulele Boogaloo has the chords and tab for the intro but the way they’ve written up the intro strikes me as crazy. It makes more sense to play it this way:

At the start of the intro bar your index finger across the third fret and leave it there until bar 4. Let as many notes as possible ring into each other – to recreate the sound of the original. The notes in brackets are ‘ghost notes’ i.e. played more softly than the others. These aren’t fully part of the tune but help to support it – it’s your choice whether to play them or not.

Buy Kill Bill Soundtrack US UK

(that must be the first time I’ve anything cheaper in the UK than in the US)

I can’t get enough of the Decemberists’ approach to lyrics. They are full of strange and threatening characters. It’s a mystery to me why murder ballads are dying out – we’re supposed to be living a culture awash with violence. Chimbley Sweep is a little more light-hearted (but with a creepy undertow) – it could be a Mary Poppins song were it not for the blatant euphemisms – but has the usual characters and anachronistic language (‘chimbley sweep’ comes from Martin Chuzzlewit). It also happens to be an excellent strum-along ukulele song.

The original version of this song was recorded by a guitar with a capo on the first fret (as you can see in this video) which puts it almost into uke territory. If you want to play along with the record, you have to tune your uke down half a step to B-tuning (F# B Eb G#) but the chords are named as the familiar C-tuning shapes. Other than that, the chords are the first few you learn.

But I couldn’t help but make things a little tricker on myself. I prefer the sound of this chord progression played when your uke is tuned to C# (or capoed at the 1st fret). The chord shapes are a little more tricky. Try it both ways and see which you prefer.

The Decemberists – Chimbley Sweep (Chords in C# tuning)

Buy Her Majesty US UK

Learn another Decemberists song on Mike’s Ukulele Page.

Read (Decemberist guitarist) Chris Funk’s agony uncle page answering queries such as, “what gift befits a newborn monarch whose father’s untimely death (by your own hand) allowed the succession of such a young heir?” And watch him bravely defend the honour of indie music against Stephen Colbert in a guitar solo challenge.

The 60th Edinburgh Festival Fringe kicked off at the weekend and – amongst the many desperate self-publicists wandering around in lurid, skin tight clothing – are a few ukulele acts.

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain

Sugar Plum Fairy (mp3)
My Baby Does (mp3) via UOGB

The biggest names in the uke world appearing at the festival will be the UOGB who will be appearing at the Assembly for three nights (this Thursday to Saturday) as part of the tour supporting their new album Precious Little.

Stuckey and Murray

Comedy duo who call their music ‘Cognitive Rock’ or ‘Cock’. If that video wasn’t enough to convince you of their cerebral charms, check out the Ukulele Song and download a couple of mp3s on SoundClick.

Appearing at the Underbelly all month.

Liz Bentley

Comedy songs and poetry taking a light-hearted look at bulimia, multiple sclerosis, expressing green breast-milk, public indecency and life as a therapist and a therapee. Her website says she’s willing to smash up a ukulele if enough people want her too. Now that’s just sick and twisted.

Appearing at Just The Tonic all month.

I recently acquired a Fluke and ill-educated people have been confusing it with a balalaika ever since. I’ve given up trying to explain it to them and have learnt to play two Russian sounding tunes on it. The first bit of this video is the tune from Gogol Bordello’s Not A Crime – from a traditional tune called Tromba de Zingari. The second part is a solo version of the Tetris theme.

I’ve tried to retain as much as I could from the duet version – which has made it tricky to play as it shoots around the neck. The trickiest section is bars 5 and 6. Originally I had it tabbed as:

I made it slightly easier for the tab. You can make it easier still by playing it like this:

Which I should have done because I was struggling with this section in the video.

One more hint: in the first bar make sure you fret the A with your third finger so you can play the next few notes more easily.

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

So, so, so many top notch ukulele videos this week.

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Uke Hunt has a MySpace. Friend me up and join the Uke Hunt endorsed Ukulele Nation.

Lyle Ritz and Roy Sakuma chat on NPR (via Ukulelia).

The C-FleaPO & R2-Flea2 Flea ukulele doesn’t exist. But Darth Vader plays uke.

Howlin’ Hobbit is dishing out bi-weekly uke tips.

An ukulele has finally made an appearance in Flight of the Conchords during the song Goodbye Leggy Blonde.

Short lived cartoon character Crazy Ike and His Uke.

A short clip of Aldrine Guerrero in the studio on DoctorTrey and a podcast with him here.

Old Blue Bus has Hawaiian tracks and WFMU’s Beware the Blog has an interview with Tiny Tim (thanks to KDUS).

Another art uke.

Naked ukulele in New York.

Be careful how you type ukulelehunt.com.

The chords for 100 Hawaiian songs.

You’re a fan of an Icelandic psychedelic-folk ukulele trio who released one album in 1964 and promptly split up. They had a stunning uke song that you have to play. The band and their oeuvre are entirely unknown to Google and the massed ranks of Intertubeland. What do you do?

I’ve been asked about this by maduke and there have been discussions about how to work out chords for the ukulele on Ukulele Cosmos and 4th Peg so I thought I’d weigh in with my 5 steps to working out chords.

Step 1. Don’t play your ukulele: At the risk of winning the Ric Olia Award for Pointing Out The Bleeding Obvious, it’s difficult to transcribe a song if you don’t listen to it. Firstly, listen to the structure of the song: where the chords change, where bits are repeated. Try picking out whether chords are major, minor, 7ths.

See if you can recognise a chord progression from a song you know. A huge proportion of songs will include the Louie, Louie chord progression. Not necessarily those chords, but the same relationship between the chords (the I-IV-V progression). If you recognise that progression, you’ll easily be able to work out about half of all songs. Read the rest of this entry »

The Magnetic Fields – If I Were A Rich Man (Chords)

Many of Stephin Merritt’s songs have a strong musical theatre style to them. He has put out an album of showtunes and has said that he wants to write 100 Hollywood musicals. So it’s no great surprise to hear The Magnetic Fields covering a song from Fiddler on the Roof.

The scratchy out of tune uke on this song gave me a few problems transcribing it. I’m fairly sure he’s playing with a capo on the third fret or tuned to Eb (Bb Eb G C), but I’ve written the chords out for standard C-tuning. If you want to simplify the song, feel free to play the open chord positions.

Requested by maduke

Buy Knitting on the Roof US

The Moonlighters – My Blackbirds Are Bluebirds Now (mp3)
The Moonlighters – Hello Heartstring (mp3) via blissblood.com

As much as I enjoyed Bust Magazine’s uku-ladies, there was a glaring omission. Writing about female ukers and not mentioning Bliss Blood is like listing the chalcogens and not mentioning tellurium – unforgivable.

Bliss Blood sings in a dizzying array of retro-groups including The Cantonement Jazz Band and Delta Dreambox along with guest appearances with the likes of Angels of Light. As wonderful as these groups are, the real thrill is seeing her busting out the uke with The Moonlighters or on her lonesome (such as in these recent videos on MUD filmed in front of the tomb of Rustie Lee). Since forming in 1998, they have become something of an NY fixture and they have even, thanks to their foot-long necks and monocles, been immortalised in New Yorker cartoon form.

The Moonlighters recreate the music made in the 20s and 30s by mainland US musicians influenced by Hawaiian music. I find the music created when two cultures mix to be fascinating. Many of the greatest musical genres arose a decade or so after guitars entered a culture (blues, African rhumba and, indeed, Hawaiian music). The mixture of ragtime/early jazz bands and Hawaiian music certainly produced its share of great songs which The Moonlighters perform beautifully. Many of the songs they play are penned by Blood but you wouldn’t notice as they fit in seamlessly.

As well as Blood, at various times Moonlighters have included former Squirrel Nut Zipper Ken Mosher, Henry Bogdan formerly of hardcore metal nutjobs Helmet and Mike Neer.

Download the entire show from which the video comes at mikeneer.com.
Download more Moonlighters tracks and other Bliss Blood projects here.

Buy Hello Heartstring US