Today is guest tab from Brazilian uker Aline Kelly. She’s one of the great ukulelists to come out of Brazil recently along with João Tostes and Vinícius Vivas. It’s been a real pleasure to see the ukulele take off there in recent years.
Aline’s performance was the first time I’d heard of Cuban composer Leo Brouwer and I immediately loved it. The switches between beautiful, flowing lines and sharp, dissonance are delicious. I recommend checking out his music if you’re at all interested in classical guitar.
Aretha Franklin put to bed the argument sometimes made by idiots that singers who don’t write their songs are somehow lesser artists. She could elevate a song like no one else. Making her version the definitive one even stealing songs from greats like Otis Redding in the case of Respect and from Dionne Warwick for whom Bacharach and David wrote this song.
I Say a Little Prayer uses a bunch of jazzy 7 and maj7 chords. I’ve notated it with a capo on the second fret (or play in D-tuning) to make the moves easier to navigate.
Suggested Strumming
A simple main strum you can use is:
d – d u – d – d u
Intro and Verses: Do the main strum once for every chord except play it one and a half times on Am7 and half a time (i.e. d – d u) on D. Which sounds like this
Chorus: The chorus is a little more complex and sneaks in a bar of 3/4. Start off with half the main strum each for C and D. Then d – d on D, u – u d – d on Em and d – d – on G7 (or d u – – if you prefer). Which looks like this:
At the end of the chorus there’s a triplet strum played twice on the C chord followed by one down-strum on B7.
Having spent my summer break measuring cotton and watching tench pole-vaulting, I thought this song from Porgy and Bess best summed up my experience.
I’ve done a few jazz tabs in the past (like Take Five and La Vie en Rose) but this is the first time I’ve used a jazz approach and used the tune as a springboard for soloing. In this arrangement I play the melody straight for the first verse. Then semi-improvise around the tune for the next two verses. Each with a different scale.
In the second verse I’m use the G blues scale. The main shapes I’m using to solo are:
There’s an exception in bar 23 (and later in bar 39). That little turnaround lick is adapted from the Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald version of the tune.
I get more adventurous in the third verse and mostly use the G harmonic minor scale. I had fun playing around with the scale. The wide gap between the Eb and Gb notes give it an unsettling feel.
These two scale boxes I’m using:
I also borrow an F (A-string, 8th fret) from the G melodic minor scale in bar 37.
I highly recommend you play around with the scales and phrasing in this piece to come up with your own version. There’s much more on the blues scale and soloing in the How to Play Blues Ukulele ebook.
It was Yorkshire Day while I was on my blog break. So to celebrate I’ve put together some riffs from my favourite Yorkshire acts. Including three from Arctic Monkeys.
twenty one pilots have been hit-and-miss for me in the past. But I’ve been enjoying the three tracks they’ve released ahead of their new album. Particularly the uke-featuring track Nico and the Niners.
There are two main ukulele parts in the song. The first is a straight-forward move from Dm7 (all the strings played at the fifth fret) to Am7 (all the strings played open). The second is a spacey single-note figure in the bridge.
Suggested Strumming
Intro and Chorus: The main ukulele riff uses a ska-inspired all up-strums. Four each per chord:
– u – u – u – u
Make sure you keep these strums short by muting them with the side of your strumming hand right after playing them. You can do this quite forcefully. You can hear a percussive click on these as Tyler brings his hand down hard to cut the strums short.
Verse 1, Final Chorus and Outro: Once the uke part cuts out you can use whichever ska-flavoured strum you like (I cover a bunch of ska and reggae strums in How to Play Ukulele Strums). I like to do this once per chord:
– – d u – – d –
Bridge: For the first half of these I just do one down-strum per chord. Then for the second half I use the strum from verse 1. So together they sound like this:
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