I’ve had this one knocking around, half finished for years. The version I’ve ended up with diverges from the original quite significantly. As well as being shorter, the fast section is completely different in terms of notes.

The most important thing is to vary the tone between the guitar and the banjo – otherwise it’s not a duel you’ll just playing the same thing twice. There are a bunch of ways you can separate the two. For the city guitar I’ve played open strings wherever possible and picked and strummed mostly with my thumb around the start of the fretboard. For the rusty, backwoods banjo I’ve used more fretted notes and picked/strummed with my finger near the bridge.

Jim Beloff’s The Ukulele: A Visual History must be the longest surviving ukulele book in my collection. Others have been discarded as useless or had the info sucked out of them and left in a draw. So it’s about time I got round to giving it a review.

What You Get

125 very heavily illustrated pages.

Chapters:

History of the Ukulele
The Great Players and Personalities
The Great Ukulele Manufacturers
The Story Continues…

The review is for the 2nd Edition of the book.

The Good Stuff

Ultimate in uke pr0n – The book is jam packed with ukulele pictures (and ukulele-related pictures and sheet music covers). There’s a huge amount of fabulous stuff to look at. Some of my personal favourites:

– The most stunning Santo ukulele I have ever seen.
– Hank’s Eukadidles for the Ukulele
– Ancil Swagerty being the chicest geek on the beach.
– A 1993 UOGB grinning like kids’ TV presenters.

It’s made to be flicked through and stared at. And doing so is a real treat (this review has taken 10 times longer than necessary to write because of the amount of aimless perusing I’ve done).

Useful reference – I’ve regularly picked up the book to check a date, name or to to answer, “Where have I seen that uke before?” niggles. While it’s not designed as a reference book, I don’t think there’s anything out there that does a better job of it than this.

And, refreshingly, it has a section on the ukulele in Japan.

Coffee-table/toilet-side book – It’s heavily diverting and not at all taxing – making it perfect for those occasions when things are either going into or coming out of your body.

The Not So Good Stuff

Busy Backgrounds – I found it hard to concentrate on reading the book. There’s a lot going on visually and the backgrounds – sometimes photographs – make it tricky to read. Partly because of this (and partly because of the way the book is structured) I don’t think I’ve ever sat down and actually read it for a significant period of time.

Due For A New Edition – A lot has happened since the 2nd edition came out in 2003. The book is definitely deserving of an update and it feels like the right time for one.

Overall

If my copy was lost, eaten by mice or combusted on a bonfire of the vanities, I’d buy a new copy straight away. Definitely worth a buy if you’re interested in ukes (and I’m guessing you are).

The Ukulele: A Visual History on Amazon

It was the anniversary of John Peel’s death yesterday. I was going to put up Napalm Death’s You Suffer in tribute. But after getting hate mail for my Dillinger Escape Plan post, I thought I’d go with something a bit more crowd pleasing.

For this version I’ve written up the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain version (from Anarchy in the UK).

Suggested Strumming

For C and Am you can go with:

d – d u d u d u
d – d u d u

Topped off with one down strum for the Cmaj7 passing chord.

d – d u d u d u

In the verse you can use this twice for each chord.

Twiddly Bits

The intro/solo riff goes a bit like this:

The rest of the solo you can noodle around with C major pentatonic.

Undertones Version

The Undertones version is two frets higher (so the chords are D – Dmaj7 – Bm and G – A).

They also have another passing chord between G and A (G#). If you want to throw it in the UOGB version, it’s F# (easiest to play it x121).

I’ve been getting a lot of comments from people complaining about the endless stream of songs I feature about Ukrainian constitutional reform. I don’t want this blog to become musically 1 dimensional so, with deep apologies to those of working on snappy rhymes for Leonid Kuchma and fitting Law No. 2222-IV into pleasant scansion, this week’s song from Eugen will be the last I feature.

Also this week krabbers is in a similarly East European protest mood, Mad Tea Party railing against name-thieves, Andrew Vincent covers Daughtry to great advantage, Herman and Paulien remind me of when the Super Furry Animals were fabulous and Misty Miller (who has been causing a bit of stir down London way but I haven’t been entirely convinced by).

Read the rest of this entry »

An interesting article about ukulele sales talking to a number of sellers (via Arch on the Cosmos). Despite a few clangers (Kamaka was established in nineteen-sixTEEN rather than nineteen-sixTY, and there’s still no ukulele in I’m Yours) it’s well worth a read through.

It’s a long article so here are a few quotes:

Sammy Ash from Sam Ash:

It’s an interesting business to watch, because it seems like whenever we add another line, it just adds more sales. One new line doesn’t seem to be taking sales away from another. That’s always a fear – if you have eight lines of guitars and you add one, you’re not selling more guitars you’re just selling less of one of the ones you already carry.

Peter Dods of Easy Music:

“They are an easy upsell. The cheaper ukes sound… well, cheap. Up from the $30 ones to over $100, the sound is noticeably different. Above $200, it’s dramatically different.

It seems like Kala are outstripping Lanikai these days. Myrna Sislen of Middle C music:

I’m excited about Kala because they make a perfectly fine uke at a reasonable price… I love dealing with Kala – they treat their dealers very well. In the rare instance there is a problem, they make it right.

Ash again:

“We’ll see two more years of growth, but now what we’re seeing is that so many manufacturers are jumping in… If you would have tried to tell me I’d be having this conversation five years ago… But there’s no store that is lacking in uke sales.

Sislen:

the uke market is growing rather than leveling – I’m selling more every month, so I would guess the market hasn’t peaked yet. I’m happy!

In other matters, this week’s ukulele photos: children’s ukulele band, goofy guy, ukulele girlfriends in a boat.

City traders are relieving all the stress of gorging on taxpayer handouts by taking up the ukulele. Although Lorraine and Suzie are denying their ‘quotes’ and would never say anything as toss-potty as, “This is definitely in vogue in the City world at the moment: It seems to be the team-building course du jour.” Plus, I think it’s been a few years since the UOGB did any teaching.

Meanwhile, Hull Ukulele Group are going in the opposite direction and getting a corporate rebranding.

Ralph Shaw is as thought-provoking as ever discussing whether to read or memorize.

Hula Dreams: Reinterpreted ukuleles.

The ukulele is topping the German charts at the moment. If any German readers can explain why IZ has hit the top now, please do leave a comment.

The UOGB are full of outdoorsy freshness after supplying a version of Reef’s Place Your Hands for this ad.

Ukuleles and guitarleles have started cropping up in Mystery Guitar Man‘s videos (visually if not always audibly) including this multi-armed version of Ode to Joy.

Guilt Free Pleasure has a couple of MP3s from I Hate You Just Kidding.

Photos: Lots of great shots in this set but this would have to be my favourite, Nicky Noble and Tobi Rix

I’ve included the video with this one because I assume most colonials are unfamiliar with the Happy Mondays and I can’t think of any way to explain what a Bez is. But you’ll need one to play this.

Lots of riffs to get a hold of in Step On – all of them presented here in the original key.

Piano Riff

In the mp3 (at the bottom) I’m fingerpicking this one – it sounds sharper. But it works well strumming out the chords as well (C, D and G) but make it easy on yourself and use C6 (all the strings open) instead of C.

Strummed Version

Guitar Riff 1

The first guitar riff is pretty straight forward.

Guitar Riff 2

The second one changes around much more. Use this as a basis and play around with it.

Riffs

Hard to believe a song this gimmicky can still sound so great after 20 years. No doubt it’s down to having one of the greatest bass riffs of all time – pilfered from Herbie Hancock’s Bring Down the Birds and very much improved upon.

Here’s the riff in C:

In C

And with a bit of prodding you can play it in the original key:

Original Key

Dillinger Escape Plan and the sort of band I’d usually be into but I caught them at Donington and they BLEW. MY. MIND. They tight, wild and batshit insane.

Milk Lizard is one of their more straightforward songs: mostly in 4/4 time, only occasional shifts in tempo and it has a singalong chorus. Obviously one for the laydees.

The riff moves to the uke pretty well – even keeping it in the same key. If you want to make it easier to play, you can drop the notes on the g-string without losing anything important. And you can drop the little run in bar 7 and keep playing the riff if you don’t feel like some pointless showing off.

Riff

This week more of the Riffs for Ukulele series – not all of them guitar riffs this time round.

The idea with these riffs isn’t to play the whole song, but to throw them in to your playing for a bit of light relief (like the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain on Orange Blossom and ukejeff does here) or just to provide one of those’ “I didn’t know you could play that on a ukulele,” moments to the uninitiated. They’re not always arranged in the original key – although this time round I’m doing that more than usual.

First up is U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday. The easiest way I’ve found to play this is to keep your index finger barred across the C, E and A strings.

Riff

And here’s a version in a more uke-friendly key (suggested by Jimmy)