Ukulele Halloween - Ghostbusters (Duet)

Ghostbusters (Tab)

Duet Midi
Uke 1 Midi
Uke 2 Midi

This record is, as far as I remember, the third record I ever bought - after Chas ‘n’ Dave’s Snooker Loopy and Van Halen’s Why Can’t This Be Love (yeah, I was one of the cool kids). It might just be the nostalgia, but I can’t get enough of this song. Bustin’ does, indeed, make me feel good.

I’ve written this up as a duet, but I think it would sound great in a uke group/orchestra/ensemble. There are easy chords for the newbies, the riff for the intermediates and some fiddly bits for the show-offs.

The intro is the only spooky bit of the song and works well on its own as an atmospheric bit of music. You can play it all on the uke, with a bit of fiddling, like this:

The riff that kicks in after this is a bit of cobble-together of the bass and the chords. It works well against straight chords and sounds great when the high riff joins in.

The trickiest section of the song is the ‘I ain’t afraid of no ghost’ section (and not just the need for turning a blind eye to double negatives). In some of the bars the chords change a beat before you’d expect them to - making them more difficult to keep track of. The synth riff also gets a bit tricky with the added harmony (bars 21 and 22). If you’ve got space on your uke, you might try playing it this way:

I’ve put up midis of both the ukes individually so, even if you’re as lonely and smelly as I am, you can play along and make believe you have a friend. If you want to play along with the original, you’ll have to tune down by half a step.

One thing about this video passed the young, fresh-faced me by but has just shocked the living bejesus out of the old, haggered me. Near the end, there’s an appearance by a very young, very gawky Al Franken. Scary indeed.

Check out Sean Gordon’s version of Ghostbusters on the uke.

Suggested by West and Retrovertigo

Buy Ghostbusters Soundtrack

Baby Elephant Walk Duet

Baby Elephant Walk Duet (Tab)

Baby Elephant Walk Duet (MIDI)

I know it’s starting to look like I’m tabbing the score to the entire 18 series of the Simpsons, but it’s only a coincidence. This tune was written by Henry Mancini for the film Hatari! to depict the lumbering and unsteady movements of large, unwieldy animal - so perhaps fitting that it was used to accompany Homer dancing.

In this arrangement, one uke takes the background riff. This is a fairly standard 12 bar blues pattern - if you slowed it down and gave it some swing it could be a Muddy Waters song. However, the spritely melody (played by the other ukulele) takes the tune a long way outside blues territory.

A quick word about the repeat signs for those of you unfamiliar with them. Play up to bar 16 where you’ll see a double line with two dots. These indicate that you should go back to the earlier set of double bars (or, if there weren’t any, to the beginning). Then play from there straight through the bar lines and on to where it says D.S. al coda - indicating to go back to the squiggle (bar 5) up to where it says Da coda. From there you jump straight to the mod-style target at bar 32 for the classic ‘and many moooooo-re‘ ending.

Tetris Duet

Korobeiniki/Tetris Theme Duet (pdf)

MIDIs: Duet, Ukulele 1, Ukulele 2

I think it’s safe to say that I’ve listened to this tune more than any other over the course of my life. Yet I didn’t even know what it was called until I started researching for this post. The tune is variously called Korobeiniki, Korobeyniki, Korobushka, The Peddlers and ‘that plinky-plonky Tetris music’. The lyrics of the song (written by one Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov in the 19th Century) tell of a young stable-boy who was obsessed with arranging different shaped straw bales as they dropped from the sky.

This duet divides the parts up fairly evenly. The first ukulele takes the main melody and the second plays a counter melody. I’d suggest that you repeat it more than is indicated in the tab, speeding up each time until you’re going at a frantic pace at the end.

“But,” I hear some of you cry, “I have no friends.” No worries. I’m working on a solo version so stay tuned.

Update: The solo tab is here: Tetris (solo)