My baritone needed restringing the other day so I took the opportunity to tune it Tune-Yards style and write up a few of her riffs.
She uses dGBE. Which is baritone tuning with a high-d string. Aquila do make a set of high-d strings but I just moved my old E-string and tuned it to D.
If you put a capo at the fifth fret in dGBE tuning it will give you standard, high-g tuning. That means you can play all these on a standard tuned ukulele and they sound right. I’d particularly recommend giving For You a go. It’s a great bit of picking and sounds even better in standard tuning.
Chuck Berry’s intro to Johnny B Goode has to be the most famous piece of guitar playing in the universe. Not only did he influence an entire generation of rock and roll guitarists, you can hear elements of his playing in all the great rock guitarists since.
The lick combines major and minor elements to make for an ambiguous, interesting run. If you already know your major pentatonic and minor pentatonic scales you’re ready to start using this trick in your own licks and improvising.
Here’s the opening lick slightly adapted for ukulele:
Pentatonic scales are made up of just five notes. Because they’re so simple they suit a huge range of music. You’ll hear them all over blues, rock, country and folk songs.
If you want a full dive into the minor pentatonic scale I go into it in my Blues Ukulele ebook. But for this example I’m just using the C major and minor pentatonic.
C Major Pentatonic
1st position
Here’s the open position of the C major pentatonic scale. It always makes me think of the My Girl riff.
2nd position
This scale shape uses exactly the same notes but slightly higher up the fretboard. Compare this scale to the lick and we’ve already got most of the notes. All we’re missing is the C-string, 3rd fret (i.e. minor third) and E-string, 6th fret (minor 7th).
C Minor Pentatonic
1st position
The minor pentatonic is all over blues and rock playing. If you’re only going to learn one scale to improvise with this would be the one.
2nd position
Moving the scale up to the second position you get this. And there are the C-string, 3rd fret and E-string, 6th fret we need for the lick.
Combined Pentatonic
Knock the two scales together and you have a scale with plenty of options. You can just got at it with this scale. But my preference is to primarily use either major or minor pentatonic then introduce notes from the other to add some colour.
1st position
2nd position
Some Examples
Descending Lick
Here’s a Chuck Berry style descending lick that uses the same ideas.
Aerosmith Style
You can hear this combination of major and minor pentatonic playing by all the rock gods (Hendrix, Clapton and Page used it regularly). Here’s a lick cribbed from Joe Perry’s solo in Walk This Way.
Combining Blues Scale and Major Pentatonic
If that isn’t enough notes you can add in a note from the blues scale. In C the only difference between the minor pentatonic and the blues scale is an F# (E-string, 2nd fret). With that you can play this BB King style lick.
The trend of increasingly complex Steven Universe songs continues with What’s the Use of Feeling (Blue)?. If it gets more complicated than this one I’m going to assume she’s doing it to troll me personally.
As they often do, Sugar posted their ukulele demo on Tumblr and it’s that version I worked from.
The chord changes come fast and furious so I’ve slowed it down a little in the video. I highly recommend practicing it very slowly before gradually speeding it up when you’ve built up the muscle memory.
There’s plenty of great chord work going on in this song with jazzy chords you might not be familiar with including maj7, dim7 and aug7 chords (which all appear on my best chords list). Even better is the way chords transition into each other. I love the parts of the progression that have notes ringing through the changes. For example, the Dm7 – G7sus4 – G7 move. In the Dm7 to G7sus4 change only the note on the g-string changes. Then from G7sus4 to G7 only the note on the A-string moves.
What’s the Use of Feeling (Blue)? (Tab)
If the chords alone aren’t tricky enough for you, here’s a tab including all the little nuances.
Following on from Good Vibrations, another Pet Sound with bass from Lyle Ritz. Sloop John B is a traditional Bahamian song. The earliest version was recorded in Nassau in 1935 under the title Histe Up the John B Sails. There are many lyrical variations. My favourite being the the verse in Blind Blake’s version (the Bahamian one rather than the American blues guy) about having to go home because his pants burst.
This arrangement starts off with that shimmering guitar riff from the Beach Boy’s version. And I keep interlacing this riff with the melody throughout. Be sure to play this softer than the melody so the two don’t get confused.
The verse is all fingerpicked with the melody mostly on the E- and A-strings with some lower notes on the C-string to keep the rhythm going. To give the chorus a bump I play the melody with strums. That means you have to switch between strumming and picking. Which can be tricky. If you need a bit more time to switch you can miss out a note or two of the backing without losing anything important.
It’s St. Patrick’s Day on Friday. Plenty of time to work up a Irish tune or two.
If you want to go all out there’s also Jonathan Lewis’s ebook Irish Tunes for Campanella Ukulele that has 35 fantastic, challenging arrangements of Irish tunes.
Just as impressive is the other half of his career as a session bassist as part of the Wrecking Crew. He played on a string of massive hits most providing bass and ukulele on one of the greatest albums of all time: The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. (At least he’s credited with ukulele on the album if you can hear it you’ve got better ears than me.)
I’ve written up two versions of Good Vibrations. Below is an easy version using just straightforward chords. And up top is a more difficult version with a bunch of trimmings.
