Favourite video this week is a short and sour song from Savannah Smith. There’s only 1 minute and 13 seconds of it so I highly recommend listening to it five times in a row. Credit goes to Bossa for turning me onto Savannah and helping me to convince her to do a video for this song.
Also this a reet-petiting good time from Paolo Nutini, a Daniel Johnston cover with belated ukulele from Mates of State, Tift Merritt’s drummer and plenty more besides.
I’m a big enough man to admit this. I was wrong and Noel Edmonds was right. Last week I cosmically ordered a Koaloha Sceptre. This week my dealer of choice put up a Sceptre for the first time. I shall never doubt the Edmonds again. He is my new Jesus.
Summer NAMM 2010 was last week. There doesn’t seem to be as much uke buzz coming out of it as the winter event. The one thing that caught my eye was the Kala Roundabout Ukulele Amp. I’ll take one in hot pink, The Cosmos. Ukeeku has a good write up of the event.
A few DeVine Ukuleles up this week from guitar and uke maker Eric DeVine. He has an impressive client list including Jack Johnson, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and Mike McCready, and Kimo Hussey.
Bobbins. Frank Sidebottom died this week. You know he did. He really did.
I pity the fool that doesn’t know how to play Kashmir on ukulele. Or what power chords are.
Very interesting interview with a ukulele collector on Collectors Weekly.
Frank Skinner does a Formby-esque tribute to the vuvuzela.
Kina Grannis’s ukulele has been nicked.
John Hodgman ukes it up with Neil Gaiman and Damian Kulash.
MP3s: Mates of the State are giving away their Daniel Johnston cover (there is uke in it, just wait), No Modest Bear have a track from Lille.
Pictures: new ukulele painting from Amy Crehore, new member of the Bobby McGee’s? #011 ukelele.
If you hadn’t noticed, I made it back from Download safe and sound and only briefly jaloped. AC/DC were, as always, highly entertaining and completely ridiculous. The biggest disappointment was Them Crooked Vultures who only had two decent and made up for it with some interminable noodling. The band I enjoyed most, and I wasn’t expecting this, were Dillinger Escape Plan (as covered by Status Quo). They’re completely off their boxes and bloody brilliant.
Another surprise was in a Slash set that contained Paradise City and Sweet Child… the highlight was the Velvet Revolver song Slither. It’s got a huge riff and should have been in my Guitar Riffs for Ukulele series long ago.
To keep it in the original key, I’m using D-tuning (you could equally use a capo on the 2nd fret).
I have adapted it quite a bit for the uke. If you wanted to play something more faithful to the original you could go with this:
For the chorus, the chords are D – C – G. Or use the shapes for C – Bb – F in C tuning.
The fake strum is a simple technique that I use a lot in my arrangements. So it’s about time I gave it a post of its own.
It’s used in fingerpicking pieces to play full chords. It sounds like a strum but it’s just done by picking individual strings in sequence.
Here it is played twice slowly then up to speed.
Instead of doing this, you could just strum the strings and get the same effect. However, doing it this way keeps your fingers in position for picking individual notes. Making for much easier and smoother playing.
Here’s a quick video combining picking and fake strums.
There isn’t any established tab for this as far as I know. I haven’t been distinguishing between fake and real strums in the past. But from now on I’ll be representing fake strums with a wiggly line like this:
You can do fake up-strums as well (although it’s more tricky and I can’t remember ever using one). But if one crops up I’ll be tabbing it like this:
You might remember a few weeks months ago I wrote a post about Sophie Madeleine looking for people to perform You Are My Favourite for her next video. The video is finished and you can watch it and grin here.
You can also buy it together with bonus gubbins and a new song. With half the money going to MacMillan Cancer support.
On to this much requested, innuendo laden song from Rocky and Balls. The chords for it are pretty simple. The only thing to watch out for is the big boy-band key change in the middle.
Suggested Strumming
For the first bar:
d – d u – u d –
Then in the bar with the quick Asus4 do:
– u d – d – d u
With the Asus4 being the first ‘d’ only. You can miss the first ‘u’ if you like.
On the A – E7 – A you can go with one down strum each.
The Bb section is the same strum with the chords just moved up one fret.
Requested by pretendings, Molly, Kim and possibly some others.
A rare occurrence this week: three videos from the same person. You may as well just visit Lila Burns’s channel this week rather than reading the post because I’ve also nicked two of the videos from her favourites.
One of them is Ólöf Arnalds for whom I’m stretching the rules (she plays charango). When you hear her I’m sure you’ll realise why. If you want to hear more, there’s a charango song she did with Bjork on Pitchfork.
Unusually, it’s a rather unshowy and understated ukulele that’s got me interested. A Ken Timms Martin Style 0 copy. Looks great and sounds lovely too.
On the more showy side is a Black Bear Lyon & Healy 5K Shrine copy.
A couple of bobby-dazzler banjo ukuleles on eBay UK: Crown Ludwig, Gibson UB-2.
So transferring the site turned out to be something of a disaster. If you emailed me on Tuesday/Wednesday (including about the podcast) there’s a good chance I didn’t get your email. So I’m not blanking you, just email again. Some comments are currently missing – I’m trying to recover them. And if you missed it you might want to find out more about the upcoming Uke Hunt podcast. At least the site is up more often than Twitter.
The story to go along with last week’s flapper drawing. Along with the evolution of a ukulele.
Google ‘ukulele’ and you will find a strange red shoe world.
Craig Robertson has the most accurate theory about the ukulele.
Tri-Tabs has a bunch of new tabs for beginners.
Leona Lewis and Matthew Morrison (off of of Glee) do a ukulele duet) and John Hawkes (off of of Lost and Deadwood) records a ukulele song for the soundtrack of his latest film.
The Daily Growl is offering up a couple of mp3s from Meursault.
Pictures: Portland buskers (if anyone knows who those guys are, I’d love to know), Sniffs, Celebrating Spontaneous Creativity
I’ve made a pact with myself that I’m going to buy a tenor KoAloha Sceptre at the next available opportunity. I don’t care how ridiculous they are, or how little I need or deserve another uke. Of course, I make that pact and the next Sceptre seller refuses to ship outside the US.
A big part of the reason I want one is that Alvin Okami is just such a great myth-maker. How could you resist after watching this extra nugget from The KoAloha Story?
He ends the section with a lovely version of This Is My Song by Charlie Chaplin (it starts at about 12:30) and it’s that version that I’ve written up. There are a bunch of useful chord variations and inversions in the arrangement that are well worth making note of.
If you want to be part of the follow-up to The KoAloha Story, you can have your own KoAloha story told in Gary San Angel’s next project.
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