I went to see the Black Keys last week and they were incredible. They’re at the perfect place in their career. They’ve got an extensive enough back catalogue to provide a set with no flat moments but they haven’t got to the stage where they’re just plodding through the songs until it’s blue M&M time.

So in homage to them for the best gig I’ve been to this year (sorry UOGB) here are my five favourite Black Keys riffs arranged for uke – in order of decreasing uke-suitability.

10 A.M. Automatic

Being mostly chord-based, this one works pretty well on the uke. I beefed up the chorus a bit.

Riff

Act Nice and Gentle

Originally, a Kinks song but the Black Keys overhauled it, made a feature of the melody-line riff and made it their own.

Riff

Tighten Up

A few variations in this riff through the song – some of which stray too far out of uke range – this one is based on the one that starts at 1:08 (1:32 in the hilarious video).

Riff

Your Touch

The intro part of this one sounds a bit wimpy on the uke, but the chord part works well. The chorus riff is the same as the verse riff with a few additions.

Riff

Modern Times

My favourite Black Keys riff but there are a few problems ukeing this one. The final A is too low. If you’re on a low-G, that’s not a problem. For the high-G, I’ve added in the C# because the extra harmony confuses the ear a little so it doesn’t stand out as being an octave too high in quite the same way. Also, if you’re using low-G you can knock the chorus riff down an octave.

Riff

Buy everything the Black Keys have ever released or consign yourself to a life half lived.

It used to be that Asian-made ukuleles were all hastily slapped together and shipped out as cheap and quick as possible. But that is changing with the likes of aNueNue in Taiwan putting quality at the top of the priority list. Now Maestro, a guitar maker in Singapore, has moved into ukuleles and is making high-spec ukes.

I threw a few questions at, Maestro main-man, Hozen and he returned some interesting answers.

How long have you been making ukuleles and how did you get started?

We had been making guitars since 2004 and had only caught the ukulele bug 2 years back. We were intrigued by the Ukulele when we first saw it and we just decided why don’t we try to make it for fun! It was never meant to be serious as there was no ukulele community 2 years back and we were the only ones supplying Singapore with it until the Chinese import started to flood the market. We told ourselves that we have to make something to stand out and if we are going to do it, we do it well.

What sort of players are your ukuleles aimed at?

Our ukuleles are aimed at everyone who are keen in picking up the instrument. We have the budget range which we like everyone else on the market outsourced it to China. Those ukuleles which we make in SG are targeted at the more serious ukulele players who desire for something better. With traditions steep in our veins as guitar builders, we prefer to build something more traditional. Our Soprano ukulele is base on the martin ukulele and our concert and tenor ukuleles are base on traditional Hawaiian shape by other traditional builders.

What separates Maestro from other ukuleles?

The main selling point for our ukuleles would be boutique class ukuleles which do not cost a bomb and everyone can afford to own a good old handcrafted traditional quality ukulele. We like to use raw materials which had been proven on guitars to build ukuleles and we focus a great deal of our energy on the timbre quality of our instruments. We also employ good old technology like a tight dove-tail joint for our ukuleles.

One of the world’s famous ukulele builders based in Hawaii once told me when I visit their factory: It doesn’t matter that our dove tail is not tight because the glue will hold it in place as the tension of 4 strings is just too small.

Well, I beg to differ and I would like to say some things are better left unchallenged.

What do you think makes a great ukulele?

A ukulele that plays well and is able to interpret the expressions of the songs you play on it. Something that just makes you want to play it without the urge to put it down.

The image of Asian-made instruments is usually of cheap, mass-produced ukes. How’s the industry there changing?

To be honest, many of the reputable brands we buy out there are of Asian origin but there are very few Asian builders who wish to spend the effort to think about what they are building and do something well instead of doing more and more. The ukulele industry is evolving as more and more people are converted to playing the instrument, as the pyramid gets bigger, there will be increasing demand for both low end ukuleles and also high end ukuleles. While the rest of the Asian builders prefer to go to the bottom of the pyramid, we on the other hand would prefer to do the opposite and challenge the builders on the upper echelons with an equally built or better built instrument at half the price of what individual builders can achieve.

How do you think making ukuleles in Singapore influences the instruments you make?

Singapore has the unique position of being at the cross-road of 2 very distinct cultures and we find our resulting designs being internationalized and easily acceptable by people from most cultures. Singapore has the good reputation of being a reliable and efficient country with a high standard of living but yet doesn’t cost you a bomb and we would like to think that our ukuleles are somewhere along the same line: A high quality ukulele that is not out of reach and most importantly something that inspires you to keep playing.

Visit Maestro.

This line in the NYT review of the Ukes’ performance at got up my nose a little:

Perhaps because the ukulele has long been treated as a four-string mini-guitar for amateurs, only a handful of ukulelists have achieved much renown…

But the more I thought about, the more I thought they had a point. OK, there are thousands of examples of the uke not being played like a small guitar. But they are outnumbered by the mini-guitar types. And if you’re not taking advantage of the uke’s idiosyncrasies you may as well be playing guitar.

Much more effective is playing the ukulele like a drum with strings or like a harp with frets

This tune by Florence and the Machine is a perfect place to start with the uke/harp crossover. In fact, I’m not 100% sure it is a harp and not a ukulele.

Suggested Strumming

You can recreate the echo sound by just doing:

d u d u d u d u

Do that four times for the G, once for the Am and twice for the Em.

Alternative Inversions

I’ve included the open chord shapes in the chart, but if you’re feeling ambitious it’s worth using this A minor to give you the upwards move from the G:

And here are some inversions further up the neck.

Twiddly Bits

In the acoustic version the chord part is played like this on harp:

And there’s a little riff like this:

And here it is slowed down a little:

Riff

It might be down to busyness or my clocks-going-back blues, but this week’s selection is shorter than usual. But the videos I did find, I very much enjoyed. Those videos include E 4 Echo making excellent use of a uke/cello combo and doing so while looking dapper, Tokyo Police Club breaking a string, and a new puppet ukulele duo.

If there’s something you think I’ve missed, be sure to let me know in the comments.

Read the rest of this entry »

The 2011 uke festival lineup is starting to take shape. The London Uke Fest is moving from a one-day, act-focussed event to a three day, strumalong and campout. And are changing the name to the London UkeyLove Festival. The organisers are looking for your feedback (they lost me at camping). A new festival on the scene is Le Fiul which aims to be a UWC (but with more pleasant views).

I had a bit of a moan when get-tuned switched to a very confusing layout. So it’s good to see a new, much better presented ukulele tuner (and a nicely written explanation of tuning too).

Bushman 2010 is under way.

You know your marriage is in trouble when your husband buys a ukulele. But you can always swap him for ukulele of your own.

New York Times have an excellent photo of the UOGB in action (and a review).

I think this might be a new record: three songs in a row inaccurately identified as containing a ukulele. And then there’s this comment: “It’s really a simple instrument. It only took me a couple months to fully learn it.”

I’m very pleased to see some Moondog tab on Uker Tabs.

MP3s: Galapaghost has his new EP available for free,free track from Craig Robertson’s new one, Paul Smith (off of Maximo Park) has a uke track on his new solo album.

Videos of interest: “Can I see yours? This is mine. Yours in much better than mine. My goodness.” (Thanks to Lorraine), Charlotte Church and her new bloke uke it up, how to woodshed on a ukulele (she’s breaking rule one: no smiling).

I think I’m pitching at a very narrow audience with this one. As it happens, I don’t have any memories of this tune either – never had a Game Gear. I came across it because I’ve recently grown an obsession with 8-bit music. And Sonic has some serious tunes . I love this one. And I have to work up a full uke version of Nullsleep’s Her Lazer Light Eyes. There’s been a half done version in the Rag Bag (PDF link) for years.

In my 8-bit searches I stumbled across this tune and immediately decided it was made to played on the uke. I was a little bit wrong. There are are tricky bits in the arrangement: a long stretch up to the 12th fret and a lot sliding around. But I think it turned out quite well.

The video that I used to work out the tune from has been pronged by YouTube but you can just about hear it in this video – along with the little ‘Level Clear’ tune that’s at the end of my arrangement.

Buy Sonic music

Not my usual uke-centric post this. But it’s an issue that affects anyone who has learned a song from the net, made a ukulele video for YouTube, written up a chord chart for a ukulele group or just attempted to learn an instrument.

There’s a lot of debate over copyright when it comes to making videos and putting up chords and tabs. But very little of it focuses on what I think is the biggest issue: the increasing length of copyright.

I have a dog on both sides of this fight. I rely on public domain work for my ebooks (and the actual book I’m working on). But the books themselves are protected by copyright. As I’ve gone along I’ve been learning more and more about copyright and the public domain. And the more I’ve learned the more unfair it seems. So here are a few things I’ve learned along the way that I think are worth considering.

Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer and I don’t even look like one when I put a suit on.

Copyright Law As It Stands (Sort of)

Like every area of the law, copyright is a bit of mess. Bits have been tacked on and patched up and there are some differences between countries (though they’re converging). But in general, when a person or company makes something (books, songs, music recordings, films) they have the sole rights to it for a certain period of time. After that, it moves into the public domain and anyone can use it however they like. So you can legally tab out a public domain tune and sell it, you can take a public domain video and put your own music to it, you can paint yourself into the Mona Lisa or you can rewrite a story and make a film of it.

The last bit of patch-up of the law in the US was the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) in 1998. This extended the length of copyright from 75 years to 95 years (for corporate works such as Disney film) or 50 years after the death of the creator (making it similar to the laws in Europe).

The act was retrospective, so anything that was still under copyright had its copyright extended. That means nothing has entered the public domain in the US since 1998 and won’t until 2018. If the pre-1998 laws still applied ukulele classics like Five Foot Two and Ain’t She Sweet would be public domain.

Patents and Why They Expire

Coming up with a new invention can take years of research and cost piles. So when someone comes up with a new invention the government gives them the sole right to use it so they can make their money back and then some. If they weren’t allowed to cash in on it, there’d be a lot fewer inventions and we’d all be worse off.

But after 20 years (mostly) patents expire. They need to. Because new inventions always build on old ones and every creative person stands on the shoulders of giants.

Good Stuff That’s Happened Because of the Public Domain

We need copyright for the same reason we need patents: so people keep coming up with new stuff. But – like patents – books, songs, films are built upon to create new uses. The first three re-uses of public domain material that pop into my head:

– Bob Dylan took this and turned it into this.
– Disney films built on stories collected by the Brothers Grimm: Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and The Princess and the Frog.
– Eliza Doolittle took this and turned out this.

There are plenty more (and better) examples. But I think all three demonstrate how creativity isn’t just the person who comes up with the initial idea.

Also, like patents, people learn from the creative works that have gone before. Hands up anyone who has learnt to play the ukulele without once learning a song that’s under copyright.

It’s an interesting comparison between patents and copyright. If 20 years worth of protection is enough to encourage multinationals to pour millions into research, is it really the case that a shirtless indie-boy will be unwilling to write a song unless it’s going to carry on making money until his grandchildren’s generation?

The Evidence

Some very smart people have looked into this issue. When the CTEA was proposed in 1998 a group of economists (amongst them five nobel prize winners including Milton Friedman) investigated and wrote The Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998: An Economic Analysis. Not being ones to hide the lead, the first part of the report is:

It is highly unlikely that the economic benefits from copyright extension under the CTEA outweigh the costs

You can judge the overall thrust of the report from that. But if you want to delve into it, it’s a short, easy read considering it was written by economists.

Also well worth a read is Chapter 9 of James Boyle’s The Public Domain which covers the European Commission’s evaluation of database copyright (stuff like phonebooks where data is collected). The EC were worried that the US database industry (which has no copyright protection) was much more vibrant than Europe’s. So they gave European’s greater database protection. The report looked into whether that change helped – it didn’t.

In the UK sound recordings, unlike most countries and most other forms of work, are only protect for 50 years (from the time of creation). A few musicians got up a campaign about this and Gordon Brown launched the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property (it’s got some good stuff in it, but I don’t recommend plowing through that one). They concluded that, while the current law should be more firmly enforced, the shorter protection doesn’t restrict creativity compared to countries with longer terms.

Why It Should Change

Copyright needs to strike a balance between the return an artist rightly deserves for their work and the right of society to its own culture. Of course, if you create something rad-tacular you absolutely deserve to your jacuzzi full of supermodels. But at the moment, the balance is way out of whack.

The continued extension of copyright has been justified by the increase in life expectancy. I think that’s entirely the wrong way of looking at it. What needs to be acknowledged is the increasing speed that ideas are being built on recycled and improved on. The speed of innovation now is so much quicker than it was when copyright first came into use. And the speed with which art is assimilated, remixed and re-imagined is similarly quick.

Because the law hasn’t kept up with this change of pace (and has gone in the opposite direction), people are starved of their culture. A copyright term of 95 years means the public domain is outside of living memory. And when there’s such a large gap between the time of creation and the ability to develop it, it stagnates. It doesn’t feel right that we don’t have any direct access to art created in our lifetime. And when people feel the law is unjust, they don’t follow it. Here’s what the Gowers Review said (3.26):

Copyright in the UK presently suffers from a marked lack of public legitimacy. It is perceived to be overly restrictive, with little guilt or sanction associated with infringement. While the law is complex, this is not principally a problem of coherence, but of a lack of flexibility to accommodate certain uses of protected material that a large proportion of the population regards as legitimate and which do not damage the interests of rights holders.

There needs to be more of a trade-off between respecting copyright and an extensive and fresh public domain. It’s a trade-off picked up in this article in The Economist. They recommend a 14 year term renewable once (the same terms as the first ever copyright law from 1710) in return for greater protection of those works that remain copyrighted.

I could live with that deal. In fact I’ll say right now, if I’m not writing about ukuleles 14 years hence I’ll make the ebooks public domain. If I am, the ebooks will get there after 28 years.

Actual Clever People

There’s loads more I wanted to say in this post – like orphan work, renewable extensions, how stupid retroactive changes are and It’s A Wonderful Life – but it’s on the long side as it is. If you want to find out more from people who are actually clever, check out:

– Free Culture by Larry Lessig and his TED talk.
– The Public Domain by James Boyle and this talk by Jennifer Jenkins who co-authored Theft! A History of Music with him.

There are a lot of very good reasons to hate this guy, but still I quite like him. And he’s obviously bringing a lot of teens to the uke. So another nevershoutnever for them (particularly since the stuff I’ve seen for this song seems completely wrong to me).

There are a lot of interesting chord shapes in this one – naming them I’ve gone for straight-forwardness over technical accuracy. With the D6 in the chorus, if you prefer you can play a straight D instead without losing much.

Suggested Strumming

Thi strum will get you most of the way through the song:

d – d u – u d –

Mostly you do that once for each chord. The exceptions:

– the G chord
– twice for every chord from the second A onwards in the bridge.
– a few bits that are just down strums. On the ladadas 3 downs on the G and one on the Gsus2. One down strum for each chord in the middle section.

For variety you could throw in a bit of:

d – d u d u d u

Pingy Bit

The little tring that crops up at the end and at intervals in the song is done with harmonics. Pay attention to the second photo on that post – it’s played the same way. You want to lay your finger very gently over the 12th fret (so it’s only just touching) right over the wire itself. Then strum down. If you don’t get your tring move your finger around and experiment until you do.

No competition for the video I enjoyed most this week: a match made in cheese-metal heaven between UKESTAR and The War Ponies. Epic beyond belief. If you want to hear the song again – and you will – check out Gio’s edit of the video. And if you’re still not satiated there’s the making of video.

Also this week: the Agony Aunts (The Corner Laughers in disguise), another one from Bob Brozman’s Wukulele performance, some extended jazz noodling from Tomoo Yamaguchi (complete with bass solo) and plenty more.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mainland are following Kala into the pastel and plastic ukulele field. Interesting that both brands seem to be distancing themselves from the plastics ukes. Kala market theirs as Makala. And the Mainlands are missing the logo on the headstock and seem to have Gecko on the soundhole sticker. Also hoosierhiver (of Mainland) was playing down expectations on the UU thread.

Another Kala trick that looks like it’s catching on is the thinline travel uke. Here’s one from Ana’ole.

Another guitar manufacturer bustling into ukuleles: the hilariously named BadAax.

Photo: College boy, playing for a pile of men.