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.

In the Hey, Soul Sister post J-Hob declared that every time I post something appaling I have pay a Fall-feit. Last time, I attoned for the song with the name that shan’t be spoke with How I Wrote Elastic Man and Theme From Sparta FC. This time I’m going for something more recent with Blindness from Heads Will Roll.

I’ve beefed the bass line up by making them into power chords:

And here’s the keyboard riff (before MES shoulder barges her out the way and starts pressing random keys):

And here’s a total screw up to illustrate the dangers of tabbing from memory:

The is supposed to be the octave stabs on the guitar (which crop up only briefly on the album version but feature heavily in the live version). As it’s actually played, ignore the last two pairs of octaves.

Here’s me putting them together:

Uke version

Buy MP3

MP3

This one was suggested by Ben and Alec in the Essential Snippets post as a tune to play while waiting.

The first part of the tune, being in C, works really well on the uke. Then it switches up to Eb and plays exactly the same thing. Which makes things much more tricky. I’ve added some fingering suggestions underneath the tab.

Videos this week include Svavar Knutur via Ukulele Languages, Brett Domino bringing sexy and a host of fantastic instruments back, Kate Micucci giving herself a nap after confusing herself with tax terms (watch this video first if you want the set-up to the song), some nasty blues-funk from Manitoba Hal and Primrose with the least safe for work song I’ve ever featured.

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