I think the best response to Batclan is to look out for the people around you and check where the fire exits are when you go to shows. And to keep making and enjoying music that celebrates fucking and satan.
Just down-ups for the most part:
d u d u d u d u
But change from A (or D) to C for the last u d u. It sounds like this slow then up to speed:
The only other part is one down strum in the, “boy’s bad news,” bits.
Gus Raucus (of GUGUG fame) has been sharing his spreading the uke love to the BBC with his fabulous video overview of 100 years of the ukulele along with Highs and Lows of the Ukulele and 5 Steps to Ukulele Fame.
An excellent edition of the Song Exploder podcast with Stephin Merritt discussing the making of one of my all time favourite ukulele songs Andrew in Drag. According to Stephin, “They don’t have ukuleles in Germany,” so all those ukulelist who claim to be from Germany are part a ukulele version of the Bielefeld conspiracy.
New Releases
– Ukulele Duels by Kara Square. An album of duets between a ukulele and different instruments. It’s pay you like.
– Names of Things and What They Do by Gentle Brontosaurus.
Ukes
– Rebel Alchemist tenor uke.
– Baton Rouge adds to left-handed ukes.
An in depth account of the UOGB vs UKUO court case.
Neil Gaiman reacts to Amanda Palmer playing Enter Sandman. Video here if you want to make your own reaction. And tab for Enter Sandman here.
This lovely PCO tune is a duet between ukulele and cuatro. But it also stands up very well as a solo ukulele piece.
If you do have a spare cuatro player laying around the tab is exactly the same. They take advantage of the fact the uke and cuatro are tuned to the same notes (in this case D-tuning: ADF#B) but the A- and B-strings on the cuatro are an octave below those on the uke. That means the same tab played on both creates two different melodies that fit together perfectly. It’s a neat trick.
For my version I was too lazy to move to D-tuning so I just stayed in C-tuning and put a capo on the second fret to get the same result.
I love this live version of Paul’s Dance so I worked from that one. There are a few differences between this and the album version. The most obvious is that the live version uses more changes in pace and dynamics.
A less obvious one is a slight change in bar 8 of the tab. The recorded version goes like this:
There are no shortage of fancy techniques you can learn that will improve your ukulele playing: campanella picking, split strokes and roll strums. But there are two quick wins that don’t require hours of practicing. They just need you to be more conscious of how you’re playing and to take control of it.
Dynamics refers to how loud or quiet the notes you’re playing are.
So you create a quiet strum by playing very softly and brushing the strings as little as you can. And loudly by digging into the strings and giving it some well. Similarly when you're picking you can softly tickle the string or really pull it before letting go. I'm going to be mixing up strumming and picking examples here but the ideas can be applied to either.
This isn’t completely practice free. It does take some control. Try strumming or picking as quitely as you can then gradually get louder and louder until you’re strumming as loud as you can. Then play softer and softer until you’re playing as quietly as you can.
If you play a repeated line loudly the first time and quietly the second you create the impression of an echo.
In this example I’m playing two different bars. Each followed by a quieter repeat:
You can extended this idea all the way to playing entire sections of a piece loudly the first time and more quietly the second. It adds a nice bit of variety to your playing and stops the audience getting bored.
You can also use differing dynamics to give the listener the impression of a loud call then a quiet response. Like this:
Otherwise known as “sledgehammer dynamics”. You can separate out sections of a song by how loud they are. So you have a quiet verse and a loud chorus. The classic example of this is Smells Like Teen Spirit.
This technique isn’t subtle but it is very effective. It's not just Nirvana who have used it, you hear it all over the place. For example, the Adele’s Hello uses exactly this technique.
As well as changing dynamics over an entire song, you can also change dynamics within a phrase or a strumming pattern (there’s a guide to strumming notation here).
Here’s a simple d u d u strum played straight:
And here it is played with emphasis to make it d u D u:
And here’s the pattern D u d u D u d u:
So you can get plenty of variety out of the simplest strum using dynamics.
You can make the piece you're playing swell by slowly increasing the intensity of your picking or strumming and make it fade by playing gradually more softly.
This technique is more subtle than the previous ones (here's where that practicing really pays off) but is very effective.
Swells are a great way to create anticipation. I used swells in the Spooky Ukulele post to build up tension in the Jaws example. They can lead the listener into a big chorus or create a crescendo to end your piece with a bang.
Penguin Cafe Orchestra use swells and fades to great effect on Paul's Dance (more on that tomorrow). The swells and fades change what is a very simple picking pattern that could sound robotic into an emotional and interesting piece.
This is the trickiest technique of all. By playing certain notes more strongly than others you can tease a melody out of what would otherwise be a picking pattern.
So take a picking pattern like this:
Here it is played completely straight:
Here it is with the notes on the C-string emphasised to create the melody there:
And here it is played with the notes on the A-string emphasised to create a melody there:
Even though most tunes will have a set tempo, there's room to speed up or slow down around that tempo to give the tune some emotion or mark out different sections.
Pacing changes are easiest to put into place when you're playing solo. Then you can change the pacing on a whim if you like. It also works well when one person is leading everyone else (like a conductor of an orchestra). But they can also work well in a group if everyone is very in sync (look at the Paul's Dance example again) or you have the tempo changes pre-arranged and well rehearsed.
The most common way to use pacing is to gradually slow down and bring a song to a close. It's the perfect way to indicate to an audience that the song is ending and they should start cheering, screaming and declaring your genius.
Here's an example of tktk using it:
Slowing down doesn't have to be done just to end a song, it can also be used to end sections within a song.
When you've been practicing a tune for days on end you get to know it incredibly well. And it's easy to forget your audience won't know it so well. It's useful to give them clues to the structure of the piece by slowing at the end of sections to separate them out more clearly.
By increasing the speed of your playing you can create a sense of excitement, peril or being out of control. Or all three in the case of Devil's Gallop.
It can be very effective but you do need to be careful how you use this technique. If you don't keep it controlled it can end up with the piece galloping away from you.
I’m looking at you, Jake Shimabukuro.
To put these techniques into practice I chose How I Felt at 2am by soixante croissants. Like Paul's Dance it has just a couple of picking patterns and uses basic chord shapes so there's plenty of room to play around with dynamics and pacing.
Also the meaning of the tune makes it ideal for using these techniques. The way I interpret it, the tune is about not being able to sleep due to an anxious, racing mind in the middle of the night (although Jess might doing something more exciting and less neurotic at 2am than I am).
The idea is that the swells represent the thoughts swirling in your mind and getting more intense. Then the fades are you relaxing a bit and dozing off before they come back again. That cycle goes all the way up to 11 in bars 27 – 30. As well as increasing the volume I increase the pace as well until at last you slow down and fall asleep at the end of the tune.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
You’ve got a song to wish your friends Happy Birthday. But what to sing to sing to the vast majority of people whom you despise? I’ve got you covered.
You can use this as the main strum in the chorus:
d – d – d u d u
But on the Gsus2 do:
– u d u d u d u
Together those sound like this:
The verses are more sparse. I do a down strum for each bar and any extra strums when I feel like it.
The little intro part takes a bit of jiggering to get on the uke. Here’s my take on it:
Dr Liz Price at the University of Hull is surveying ukulele players to find out how the ukulele might, “protect and enhance mental and physical well-being.” In my experience, not at all but…
Videos
– … clearly my experience isn’t universal: Madeline’s Story: Conquering Muscular Dystrophy with a Ukelele.
– Madonna picks up a ukulele for True Blue.
Pictures
– Black Bear’s Gauguin ukulele.
– Backyard uker and friends.
– Another backyard uker and friends.
– *Aggressively strums ukulele*.
Playing
– The best way to play Esus4.
BBC Radio 4 documentary on cricker WG Grace with uke playing from the UOGB’s Will Grove-White.
I’ve tackled Ray Parker Jr’s Ghostbusters theme once before way back in 2007. But I wanted to return to it to tidy it up and make it into a full instrumental version for a ukulele group. Also because it’s a stone-cold classic.
This version has five different ukulele parts of differing levels of difficulty (including one that just involves smashing the strings in time) and each one can be simplified or fancied up as suits.
This part takes care of all the chord work. For almost all the song the chords are just C – Bb – F. You can choose whichever inversion of those chords suits your playing.
This part plays the riff for most of the song. For the intro and middle sections I make use of campanella style. Letting close harmony notes ring into each other makes them extra spooky. If that’s not your bag you can play the intro like this:
And the middle like this:
It’s important to make this part as expressive as you can to give it the feel of a vocal melody.
As well as handling the vocal melody, this part plays the guitar lick in bars 27-28 and 43-44.
My original plan was to combine this part and the melody part. In the end I split them off so I could have the vocal part more prominent than this one. But the two parts are never playing at the same time so you can easily combine the two into one part if you wish.
The part starts of by plucking the strings with a pick between the nut and the pegs. It’s always high-pitched and out of tune up there so you’ll always get a spooky effect from it.
The intro spooky noises do include one additional uke. I scrapped a pick along a wound low-G string to get a bit of a creaking effect.
No notes at all in this part. I’m just muting all the strings with my fretting hand. I’m using two main patterns. The first one in the video I strum down right in front of the bridge to create a thud. Then up again in that area. Then and other down-up where the fretboard hits the body.
The next pattern is the same sort of idea. Start with the same down-up near the bridge. Then three down-ups at the fretboard.
The bridge strums do give you a good sound but they’re a bit tough on the fingers and not essential. You can also emphasise beats just be strumming more forcefully.
UPDATE: Sam asked for a combined tab so here it is:
I’ve written up a fair few Halloween songs over the years and have spotted a few common traits that make for a spooky song. Here are some tricks you can use to write your own terrifying tune or spook up an existing one.
The quickest way to create a creepy, unnerving chord is to play notes together that are a semitone (i.e. one fret) apart. Since the strings of a ukulele are tuned so close together it’s perfect for doing this.
Similarly playing chromatic notes (notes that are a fret apart) in sequence also sounds spooky.
The classic example of this is the theme to The Twilight Zone. Here’s an example that uses a similar idea:
You can create suspense by playing slow, quiet and low (or as low as you can on a uke) and build the tension by getting faster and louder. The most iconic use of this is the Jaws theme (which, again, uses chromatic notes)
When the time comes to release that suspense get as high, loud and dissonant as possible. Just like the shower scene in Psycho.
This example combines those two ideas:
Almost all common chords contain a perfect fifth note (e.g. a C chord contains the root note C and a perfect fifth G). Moving the fifth note up one fret you get a sharpened fifth (in a C chord you’d move the G up to G#). Because it’s so unusual an unexpected it has a very unnerving feel.
This was used to great effect in Chopin’s Funeral March and The Halloween Theme. Here’s an example using the same idea:
Similar to the sharpened fifth but this time you’re moving the fifth note down one fret (in a C chord you’d move the G down to F#).
This is known as the devil’s interval. It was considered so evil it was banned in churches.
The most famous use of the devil’s interval is during the octaves the very start of Purple Haze. Hedwig’s Theme from Harry Potter goes one step further and uses a flattened fifth and a sharpened fifth together (bar 21 of that tab). Perhaps those nutty evangelicals were right about Harry Potter being satanic after all.
This example is in C minor. It shifts octaves up the fretboard and includes flattened and sharpened fifth notes:
I had a go at using some of these techniques to come up with my own spooky ukulele tune and this is the result:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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