It’s nearing the end of the year and the Ukulele 2016 Spotify playlist is taking shape. As always, there’s a wide variety of great music from world famous virtuosos to low-fi indie acts, novelty songs to slick Hawaiian standards. So whatever you’re into you should find something you like on there.
I wrote up the chords for Hallelujah way back in 2008. But, since it’s a huge hit with ukulelists, I wanted to do an instrumental version as a little tribute to Leonard Cohen. And a tribute to Jeff Buckley since the intro is completely ripped off from his incredible version.
I try to keep most of my tabs fairly disciplined and work them up fully beforehand. It’s easier for people to read and learn that way. But be warned: this one I played pretty freely then tabbed out what I played. So the fingerpicking is all over the place.
In the verse the melody is everything played on the A-string plus the third fret of the E-string. Everything else is backing so should be played a little more softly. The chorus is more strange since the melody notes are played on the g-, C- and E-strings. I’ve notated all the melody notes with an accent > above them.
You can just use this dead simple pattern all the way through:
d – d u
Picking Pattern
Suzanne (Picking Tab)
I’ve also moved the picking into the key of F as it makes it much easier. You can play along with the original by tuning down to Gb B Eb Ab. Or here’s a tab of the picking in E I did before giving up on it.
The tab goes from the intro through the first verse and you can use the same patterns throughout the song.
You pick the E-string with your index finger, A-string with the middle finger and your thumb for both other strings.
Spooky New Releases
– The Bookshop Band are a great folk trio who write songs based on literature. Their latest is a collection of tunes inspired by spooky tales That Ghost Belongs to Me (Thanks to Ron Hale for turning me onto them.)
– New Ramonesish EP from Bloody Death Skull: The Haunting of….
Carrying on from The Joker, more of my favourite slide moments.
I wrote an ebook about playing slide ukulele. But the number one tip is: mute everything. Slide playing is noisey (which is part of its charm) so you need to mute the strings behind the string with your index and middle fingers. And use your picking hand to mute any strings you aren’t playing at that point.
Tunings
None of the tunes here are played in standard tuning. When you have to play all the strings at the same fret it’s useful to tune the strings so they make an open chord.
The tunings used:
Open C: gCEG Tune the A-string down to G. Open F: fCFA Tune the g-string down to F and the E-string up to F. Open G: gBDG Tune the C-string down to B, the E-string down to D and the A-string down to G.
Starting with the greatest slide guitarist of all time. The intro to Cross Road Blues is an absolute classic.
The intro mixes up slide and notes played with fingers. It’s all slide up to the triplet at the end of bar 2. Then it’s all fingers apart from the two notes at the seventh fret.
Another Robert Johnson tune. This time the Mighty Zeppelin’s cover of Traveling Riverside Blues. Again mixing up slide and fingers. All slide in bar 1 and all fingers in bar 2.
Bad to the Bone is the iconic slide rock riff. All slide for this one. The tab alternates between the main riff and short licks. Feel free to improvise around these.
A definite Bad to the Bone influence in this White Stripes riff. The tab starts with the riff that ends the verses and leads back into the main riff. The notes with simultaneous sixth and seventh frets are played with the fingers.
There’s a neat little trick at the end of the solo in Steve Miller’s The Joker. While the backing guitar plays a C chord, the lead guitar slides into an F chord. The two chords blend together to make a much more interesting sound than they do individually.
Stacked chords like these are known as polychords and there’s a lot of potential for them on ukuleles where chords are limited to four notes per uke.
Here’s the averagest chord progression possible: C – G – C – G
The two ukes blend together to create the progression: Cmaj7 – Gmaj7 – Cmaj7 – Gmaj7.
You can pull this trick with any major chord. When you combine a major chord with a minor chord a third higher (i.e. the root note is four frets higher) you get a major 7 chord. For example:
F + Am = Fmaj7
D + F#m = Dmaj7
Bb + Dm = Bbmaj7
The Theory
The theory behind it is pretty simple. Each major and minor chord is made up of three notes. In the example of C and Em they’re:
C chord: C – E – G
Em chord: E – G – B
And Cmaj7 contains four notes:
Cmaj7 chord: C – E – G – B
Blending the C, E and G with the B from the Em gives you all the notes you need for a Cmaj7 chord.
Getting Fancier
You might already be familiar with maj7 chords and already playing them. But what about 9 chords (Prince’s favourite chord) that contain five notes? Playing them on one uke you have to ditch one of the notes. But by stacking chords you can create them by playing a major chord along with a minor chord a fifth above it.
In this example the left panned ukulele is playing:
Some other chord combinations that produce this sound:
A + Em = A9
D + Am = D9
G + Dm = G9
Up the Neck
So far all the chords I’ve used have been the bog-standard, from-the-book shapes. But you can use this technique to the fullest by using chord inversions up the neck. That’ll give you a much wider range of notes in the chord.
Some of the stuff in this post is definitely on the technical side. And I’d recommend using it a lot more sparingly than I have in these examples. But I hope it’s given you a few ideas to spice up playing with more than one uke and encouraged you to experiment. There are so many possibilities it’s a shame to have every uke playing the same thing all the time.
I’ve felt in a bit of a rut recently. And I’ve found the best way to bust it is to changing things up a bit. So I slipped a slide on my finger and tried out some of my favourite slide guitar bits on uke. Including The Joker‘s pompatus packed solo.
In the verse (and the first solo) you can use that once for every chord. But I like to mix it up with a “dudududu” on the last Bb of each line like this:
You can use the main strum for almost all the choruses. But there’s a slight change in one chorus and the second solo with a C-Csus4 move. There I strum down twice on the C then “du” six times on the Csus4. Then two more downs and six “du”s on the Csus4. It sounds like this:
First thing to do for the slide solo is to tune your A-string down to G. That creates an open-C tuning. Second thing to do is to make sure you mute the strings behind the slide and mute all the strings you’re not playing.
I threw the little wolf whistle that crops up a couple of times at the end of the solo. You don’t need much accuracy in playing it. I just slide up as far as I can go. Then slide up to about the tenth fret and down.
