You might have already had a sneak preview of this post, but here’s the finished article.

Today’s tube includes Ukulollo with Siwar from Ukuleles for Peace. They’re currently offering a pineapple ukulele for the best ukulele song. You can find out more in this video.

Also featured is Miss Jess. Her fantastic EP, Jammin’ at Jacksons, is now available on iTunes so you have no excuse for not picking up at least a couple of tracks (Philadelphia and Finally Mine are indispensable).

Also up is Salwa Azar, Zooey Deschanel, some blinding bluegrass and plenty more.

I’ve probably missed a bunch of videos while I’ve been away on holibobs so I hope you’ve been following UkeToob.

There’s another video you should be aware of: Eliza Doolittle’s Skinny Genes. Looks like she’s being set up as the English Miley Cyrus.

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I didn’t know much about Locals ukuleles but Noela Castro left a comment on the site with some info, “Aloha, I am the maker of Locals Ukuleles. I work out of home garage in Makakilo-Oahu, Hawaii. Just a little about myself and how I got started. I started back in 1996 with K.C. Moore of Kelii Ukulele Company. Kelii just started his company about 2 month before I started with him. It’s been 12 years of helping him to build the Kelii product to a household name in this industry. Every ukulele that went through there had my detail finish on it. Along with shaping all necks, which after got its final C & C machine made copies, to bridge design, head stock, intonation and so on. In 2008 it was time for me to move on and fulfill my own dreams and goals. So here we are today, “Locals” Is just one label I started. In May of 2010 be on the look out for “Ka’Ohana” Ukuleles. I am proud to say as a 60% blood Hawaiian, that these ukuleles have a true Hawaiian sound with the finest quality of craftsmanship. And, to all of you who bought one of my ukulele’s, I say with much Aloha and Mahalo for keeping our culture and heritage alive today. Aloha ”

In the last window shop I mentioned the suspiciously cheap Ashbury AU-34S. Brian sent me a message with his experience, “I bought an Ashbury all Koa Tenor at Hobgoblin a couple of years ago for
£150. The wood is sooooo thick (perhaps 3rd grade koa can’t be cut thin). It has a built in amp that runs of a 9v battery which weighs a lot, and it has machine head tuners like the AU-34S. It is as heavy as a brick! But to be fair it does sound good.”

The Kala UBass has proved to be a huge hit. Even finding its way into the hands of the likes of Raul Malo and Jermaine of Flight of the Conchords. So it’s no surprise they’ve been filling out the range. Their latest prototype is a UBass with a slotted soundhole.

In other Kala news, I’ve caved in and bought a Pocket Ukulele. So expect a review of that before too long.

Strange girl w ukulele.

Bossarocker is doing a ukulele show for Chorlton Arts Radio (a non-profit community radio station) and is looking for people to contribute their ukulele tracks to be played on the show. If you want to be featured, you can find more details here.

Classical ukulelist Herman Vandecauter has started a blog where you can find MP3s and such. Although not, as yet, his neighbour’s self portrait.

PBS special on Kamaka ukuleles.

Podcast of the SXSW Ukulele for Geeks talk.

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain are rather annoyed at the United Kingdom Ukulele Orchestra.

Mary Lou Dempler is looking for donations of (used or new) instruments and books for Boys’ Haven. If you can help out, contact her here.

Lil Rev will be releasing a new book titled 101 Licks for Ukulele according to the Humble Uker.

Mia Farrow ukes it up in Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo (thanks to Joe Zane for the correction on that).

I’m not quite sure what’s going on with Le Soir’s Ukulele Sessions. The old site disappeared. A new one has reappeared here. But I couldn’t get any of the videos to work.

Got a Ukulele isn’t impressed with the Duke of Uke.

Listen to a full James Hill show.

Darlin Ukulele T-Shirt

A mind-map of famous people who uke.

MP3s: Pegasus Bridge do a couple of their tunes on uke, Mad Mackrel has an MP3 from Lille, Stereogum has a track from Buke and Gass.

Photos: Mighty Boosh ukulele, Mallardy.

In the emails: In response to the birthday post, Dave made a great suggestion: “A uke ‘learning’ community / forum”. I think it’s a really interesting idea to have a forum that’s solely based on helping people play better but I’m not sure if it would take off. I’d love to know what you think of the idea in the comments.

The site is three years old today. I was originally going to do a review of the year but I decided to give that a post of its own and stick with the annual self-indulgent post.

Stats

The number of people visiting the blog continues to make me feel woozy whenever I think about it. The third year of the blog saw 2.1 million visitors and 10 million page views. There are over 3,500 subscribers. All of which are well up on last year’s stats which you can see in last year’s round-up.

And it looks like I might be heading back to the top of the ukulele site list.

A massive thanks to everyone who visits the site. And thanks in particular to everyone who gets invloved by commenting, emailing and mentioning the site around the net. Knowing that people appreciate the site and find it helpful really makes the difference when I feel like packing it in.

Visitors by Country

1. United States (more than all the others put together)
2. United Kingdom
3. Canada
4. France
5. Australia
6. Germany
7. New Zealand
8. Sweden
9. Japan
10. Ireland

Coming Up (Or Not)

Will Happen

More ebooks: I’ve been promising How to Play Classical Ukulele and How to Shred the F**k Out of a Ukulele for an age now. I had blocked out the Christmas break for writing How to Shred… but events took over.

In the spirit of getting things done, making commitments and scaring the crap out of myself, I’ll set the release dates:

How to Play Classical Ukulele – July 1st 2010
How to Shred the F**k Out of a Ukulele – November 3rd 2010

Feel free to kick me in the arse if I miss these.

Fewer Posts: Cutting down on the Monday posts hasn’t caused a single protest so I’ve decided to stop posting on Sunday as well (for now).

Might Happen

More Uke Hunt T-Shirts: The nightmare of finding a decent site to put the last batch of Uke Hunt t-shirts has made me hate the idea of t-shirts. But since the redesign I’ve had a lot of requests for them.

Taking How to Play Ragtime Ukulele off the market: I’m not sure if it’s up to the standards of the other ebooks any more.

Ukulele Applications: I’ve never bothered to properly learn any computery stuff. Along the way I’ve picked up enough HTML, CSS and PHP to break things but nowhere near enough to fix anything. So I’ve committed myself to learning these things (I might even tackle Ruby on Rails but only because I have a man-crush on David Heinemeier Hansson).

If I manage to get any good at PHP, I have a bunch of ideas for apps I want to make – most of the uke related. If any of them are actually any good, I’ll share them here. And if anyone has any advice on learning this stuff, let me know.

A Real Life Book: Not for the first time, there are talks of me working on a real life book. This one I’m really excited about. Although it’s very early days and, on past experience, it’s very unlikely to happen.

Definitely Won’t Happen (Probably)

EUkulele: I had a great idea: travel around Europe and meet a ukulele player in every country in the EU. Then I remembered I hate traveling, am terrible at meeting people and am organisationally incompetent. Idea ditched.

Sponsorship and Ads: I get offers for these but there’s no way. Mostly because I piss everyone off sooner or later. The one exception is the search page. Since the redesign I’ve been using Google Site Search because it’s far better than the usual WordPress site search. The down side is the ads. I could pay to have them taken off but, with it being a big site, it’s a pretty hefty cost. I don’t make any money off the ads myself, so don’t click them to do me a favour or anything like that.

If you want to sway me on any of these or you’ve got any good ideas for what I should be doing, let me know in the comments.

Screw you guys, I’m going on holiday!

Don’t be that jealous, though. I’m only going as far as the Lake District.

So the next post you get from me will be the third birthday post on the 13th. Gosh, doesn’t time.

Love ya. Bye.

90s flashback this week with videos from Billy Corgan and Eddie Vedder (channeling John Lennon for the benefit of Conan O’Brien). Also this week, a new song in the UOGB repertoire, a Neutral Milk Hotel ukulele cover band, Taimane in her back yard (she’s so great when she’s not trying so hard) and plenty more.

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Okay, which one of you bastards bought the tenor Sceptre when I was about to?

New Fluke design: Kente Fluke.

The Ashbury AU-34S seems suspiciously cheap. An all solid koa ukulele for £250? And it’s sold by the Southern Ukulele Store so I’d expect it to be legit.

Pizza doesn’t have to be a pie any more.

I’ll be off on holiday by the time you read this. And not one of those fake holidays where I just stop blogging and spend every day laying in bed. A real holiday where I go somewhere. So after tomorrow’s videos there won’t be any posts for three weeks.

Jim D’Ville’s Play Ukulele by Ear is now now available for download (for $18). You can read my review of it here.

Assuming the ash air transport authorities come to their senses and hire Kate Bush and Donald Sutherland to sort out the ash cloud, the UK will soon be playing host to a full Beatles Complete on Ukulele show in London in July. And the Corner Laughers are coming over in May.

Eliza Newman teaches Al Jazeera how to say the name of that volcano by the medium of song.

Two acts have been posting chords to their songs (something which should be heartily encouraged) Howlin’ Hobbit and Craig Robertson.

Head to Finland and learn to build ukuleles with Pete Howlett.

Raul Malo and his fans are impressed with his new UBass.

Armelle discusses the Paris Ukulele Bazaar.

Rock’n uke.

In the comments: Lizzie got me thinking about chord notation. If you’ve got any thoughts on the best way to indicate chord inversions, let me know.

The biggest surprise that came from my stats-trawl is that, after Hey, Soul Sister, this song is the second most searched-for-but-not-found on the site. And this one is much more of pleasure to put up.

The song doesn’t feature any uke and is in the uke-unfriendly key of Ab. So capo 1st fret (or sing it down half a step).

Suggested Strumming

For most of the chords you can use this two bar pattern:

d – d u – u d u
– u d u – u d –

The only exception is the final line in each verse, just use the first part of the strum once for each chord except the final G (which is back to the original pattern). In the final verse, the C in the last line also uses the two bar pattern.

Buy it on BandCamp.

I’ve used Guitar Pro for all the tabs I’ve made on the site. It was easily the best tabbing software around but GuitarPro 5 had a number of drawbacks for uke tabbers (read about them in my review). So I was very eager to try out GuitarPro 6 which was released earlier this month.

Here’s what I’ve found as I tested it out and I roped in BrianW who kept a very close eye on the bugs and problems with GP5.

Should I Upgrade to Guitar Pro 6?

Brian: This is a stable product and is a big upgrade and improvement on GuitarPro 5. We have been waiting for 2 years and it was worth it. The team have obviously taken the decision not to drip-drip minor fixes and improvements, but to take their time in re-building the product from the bottom up. Performance is very good on my Windows 7 machine.

The Big Improvements

Mac Version

Woodshed: This is a massive improvement. GP5 was unusable on the Mac. Hampered in what it could do and constantly crashing. GuitarPro 6 can do everything the PC version can do and I haven’t had any problems with it crashing.

Layout

B: Tools are now on the left of the screen. At first this seems strange, but it allows editing of a ‘what you see is what you get’ of a music sheet A4 portrait format – this look and feel (after a while) began to grow on me!

Multiple files can now be opened at the same time, and are displayed as Tabs across the top – not standard Windows layout, but very nice, once you get used to it

W: After the initial, “Holy crap, where is everything?” I found the new layout really easy to use. The browser style windows work great. The monochrome colour scheme is more modern but less friendly than old brownie.

The Ukulele is Fixed

W: Finally! The ukulele tuning is now right (for C, D and low-G tunings). And the standard notation is now in the correct octave. You can adjust the tuning to whatever you like via the tuning panel (yeah, it’s a bass guitar but you can’t have everything).

The Panels

Panels are little windows on the left, the two most useful are a chord panel (makes it so much easier – would be nice if you could drag and drop them into the score) and the lyrics panel (so you can now just type up the lyrics, divide them into syllables and you’re done).

Smaller Improvements

W: – As well as tab and standard notation you can now show chords in slash notation like this:

Brilliant new feature which I may well use for showing strums in future.

– You can set up templates for tabs that you can use as a basis for future tabs. That means you can set the layout you like, ukulele tuning and fill the chord panel with often used chords.
– Undo stretches back a lot further.

B:- Full Realistic Sound Engine (RSE) for non-rock band instruments (grand piano, strings etc.)
– Grand staff automatically supported for grand piano
– Multi-track lyrics
– Post-production sound features such as attack etc.
– More reliable input from PowerTab
– Notes can be made of longer duration or shorter by a keyboard short-cut (yes a simple idea, but a good one!)

W: Those of you with an incredible eye for detail and no life whatsoever will have noticed that the tabs on the Fall post had a transparent background rather than a white one. The tab images are now exported as .png rather than .bmp.

Niggles

W: A few things have got worse:

– You can’t transpose directly from one instrument to another. You have to create a new track with the right instrument and copy/paste to the new track.
– When you’re setting chord names on the uke they almost always come up as slash chords e.g. an F chord will automatically be set as F/C.
– Right aligned ‘1’s look strange in chords.

B: – Still no output to Powertab and continuing poor Music XML support e.g. to and from professional software such as Finale and Sibelius.
– Fingering notation: text positioning remains a problem (especially for re-entrant instruments like the uke where different fingers produce the same note). (UPDATE: There are options in the stylesheet for the placing of fingering notation).
– The Help file is in HTML not a Windows help file. I cannot find a ‘search’ feature (W: There is a search feature in the Mac version, but I agree, the help needs work). A list of keyboard shortcuts is missing and will be ” be made available in the very near future with an automatic update.”

Overall

W: If you’re on a Mac, upgrade without a second thought. I also think it’s well worth the money if you own GP5 on the PC. Fewer crashes, easier to use and much better for uke use.

B: It is good that existing users are offered a substantial discount on the upgrade – and the special offer for €30 upgrade cost for existing GuitarPro users only lasts until the end of April – existing GP users should upgrade immediately.

Is It Worth Buying Guitar Pro 6?

B: Technical support has been good over the last 2 years – Franck at GuitarPro has responded quickly and helpfully to problems some of which were due to my own ineptitude in using the software and understanding music, and others which were genuine limitations or bugs present in GuitarPro 5.

B: Given that GuitarPro 6 is so much more capable than the previous version, the fact that it is selling for €60 is very good value for money. Sibelius G7 costs €150 (£100) and I am not sure that it is any better, and it is certainly not easier to use. However, many people will continue to battle on with PowerTab, but the flexibility of input into the standard notation bar that GuitarPro is worth the difference on its own.

You can Buy Guitar Pro 6 here.