Alaska in Winter – Close Your Eyes, We Are Blind (Chords)

It’s been far too long since I had some Zach Condon on the blog. And the tune he did with Alaska in Winter is packed with Beirutisms (the Bbadd9 chord, hammering on the g-string, 2nd fret in the F chord, switching the song half-way through).

Suggested Strumming

In the first half of the song use:

d – d u – u d u

Once each for Bbadd9 and C7.

For the F chord do the same strum twice but on the first strum only hold down the E-string, 1st fret of the F chord and hammer-on the g-string 2nd fret. He does vary the strum in the second bar often. You could also use:

d u d u d u d u

With your finger off the g-string (so you’re playing 0010) for the second half.

There’s not much uke for the second half of the song, so feel free to make up your own strum. Once it picks up, you could use:

d – d u d – d u

More Beirut ukulele

Stephin Merritt – Magnetic Fields

Who? Dark humorist and dour songwriter with Magnetic Fields, Gothic Archies and other projects.

What’s so special? The first alternative act I heard use the ukulele (in 1999′s 69 Love Songs). Put to rest the idea that everything sounds happy on the ukulele. Introduced the ukulele to a generation of youngsters who are a little too intelligent and cynical for Harry Potter by providing the soundtrack to Lemony Snicket.

Want to hear more? Gothic Archies – The Tragic Treasury

Learn to play like him Smile Tab

Zach Condon – Beirut

Who? Interrailing indie star.

What’s so special? Made it passe for anyone to play something as obvious as a guitar and widened the hipster’s sonic palette to include brass, accordions and, yes, ukuleles.

Want to hear more? Beirut – Gulag Orkestar

Learn to play like him Beirut Chords and Tabs

Dent May and His Magnificent Ukulele

Who? Crooning ukulele lounge singer.

What’s so special? Giving the ukulele equal billing and lending the instrument a barrow-full of nerd-cool.

Want to hear more? The Good Feeling of Dent May and his Magnificent Ukulele

Learn to play like him Meet Me in the Garden Chords

tUnE-YaRdS

Who? Crazy cat lady with a ukulele.

What’s so special? Easily the most startling ukulele player around today. Completely original and endlessly compelling.

Want to hear more? tUnE-YaRdS – BiRd-BrAiNs

Learn to play like her Hatari Tab

Mirah

Who? Prolific indie folkie.

What’s so special? Ukulele packed debut You Think It’s Like This, But Really It’s Like This in 2000 showing that the ukulele can do more than just gentle strumming.

Want to hear more? Mirah – You Think It’s Like This, But Really It’s Like This

Learn to play like her Million Miles Tab

The improver section will have set you up with some serious chops. Now it’s time to start digging into tab and really showing off.

Step 1: Learn to Read Tab

- Frets and Strings
- Rhythm
- First ukulele tabs. A few short and simple but highly effective bits of tab:

WIUO – It’s A Heartache Introduction
Postcards from Italy Introduction
Kings of Leon/WIUO – The Bucket
Black Sabbath – Iron Man

Extra Credit: Follow the fingerpickinng lessons.

Step 2: Useful Licks

Hawaiian turnaround
Outros
Essential snippets to amuse your friends.

Extra Credit: Play a bunch of blues licks, riffs and solos in the How to Play Blues Ukulele ebook.

Step 3: Theory

- Learn some scales:

Minor scales
Major scale
Minor pentatonic scale
Blues scale

- How I work out chords
- Playing slash chords on the ukulele

Extra Credit: Harmonizing a melody

Step 4: Get a Solid Ukulele

Once you’ve reaching this stage in your ukulele playing, you’ll have put in many hours of practice. Before you get much further it’s time to get yourself a really nice, solid-top ukulele. Ohana and Kala both have solid ukuleles at affordable prices. If you budget stretches a bit further, take a look at KoAloha and Pono.

Now head to the advanced section and prepare to blow people’s mind with your mad-skills.

If you think there’s a post that deserves a link here or have a topic you’d like me to cover in this section, leave a comment.

You’ve just got your hands on a ukulele (or are just thinking of buying one). Here are a few things to read and songs to play that’ll get you up to speed quickly.

Step One: Learn the basics

- So You’ve Just Got Your First Ukulele – a free PDF I put together for beginners including essential links, first chords, tips and links to suggestions for the first songs to learn.
- 10 Things I Wish I’d Known About Ukuleles (Before I Bought One) – Don’t make the same mistakes I did.
- 10 Tips for Ukulele Beginners
- How to read chord charts.

Extra Credit: Ukulele for Dummies – The (paper) book I wrote covering all the ukulele basics from buying your first uke, to strumming, chord shapes and far beyond.

Step 2: Get Your Strum On

- Ukulele Strumming for Dummies
- Strumming notation
- 13 Most Useful Strumming Patterns

Extra Credit: – How to Play Ukulele Strums – An ebook I wrote covering all the strumming and rhythm essentials for beginners.

Step 3: Play Some Songs

Check out the Songs with Chords You Know Post

Some popular ones:

- Somewhere Over the Rainbow
- I Wanna Be Like You
- Hallelujah
- 5 Years Time
- Sentimental Heart

Extra Credit: Joan Jett – Bad Reputation – Easy chords but you’ll need to have your chord changes down and a strong strumming-hand to play it up to speed.

Step 4: Spend Some Money

- A ukulele tuner
- Some good strings like Aquila.

Extra Credit: Keep your ukulele upright with a stand. Get a capo to make playing in other keys easier.

Congratulations! You’re no longer a noob. You can now advance to the improver section.

If you think there’s a post that deserves a link here or have a topic you’d like me to cover in this section, leave a comment.

I do sometimes have it brought home to me that not everyone hangs on every single word I say. Hard to believe, I know. So here are a few things that are popular, good or over-looked that might have slipped by you.

The Most Popular Tabs and Chords

Well, it’s all fairly obvious stuff. Exactly what you’d expect.
Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Beirut
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Wait! What? Yes, Daft Punk is the fourth most visited tab/chord post on the blog. No, I don’t know why.

My Favourite Tabs and Chords

James Bond Theme – I think it’s the best arrangement I’ve done. Other people tend to think it’s…
Baby Elephant Walk – I like this one but it needs some work.
Sophie Madeleine – Take Your Love With Me – Just a brilliant chord progression.
Davy Graham – Angi
Naked As We Came – yeah, it was only yesterday. But I like it.

I Should Have Just Stayed in Bed

I toiled for hours. Deep into the night I sat playing. Sweat dripping from my brow. Blood dripping from my fingers.

Bollocks to you James Earl Jones. Sometimes you build it and no-one comes.

Carl Ray Villaverde’s version of Tears in Heaven
Chopin’s Funeral March
Mara Carlyle’s Baby Bloodheart

The How to Play Ukulele eBooks

I’m reliably informed by proper internet marketing people that I should sell my ukulele ebooks a lot harder than I do. Because most people visiting Uke Hunt would have no idea they existed – I’m sure quite a few regulars might not know – and those that do know they exist might not know that I’m the one who wrote them.

I don’t want to go all hard sell on them, but I will make them a bit more obvious. Because I think they’re really good and I’m proud of them.

The Interviews

Most viewed:

Rod Thomas – this one has been viewed over 10,000 times. I couldn’t be happier to give him any exposure I can – he’s the nicest guy in the world. And I have a man-crush on him.
Kate Micucci – is also very sweet. But I don’t fancy her as much as I do Rod.

My faves:

Gus from GUGUG
Dean ‘Minor Constellations’ Engle and Madeline Ava – Both insanely talented young lyricists. Dean has released a new album which you can download free on Rack & Ruin Records (click the album cover). Madeline’s stuff has disappeared from the interwebs along with CLLCT (*sobs*). After reading about her on here, Dean asked Madeline to marry him. I’m still hoping it’s going to happen – it’d make me the happiest blog-pimp in the world.

Useful Stuff

Slash chords – People are always asking, “how do you play B/C on a ukulele?” or some such. I think part of the problem is that people don’t know what to Google when they have that problem. So if you don’t know what a slash chord is, read the post now.
Blues scale and Pentatonic scale – essential if you ever want to do any improvising and solo shenanigans.
10 Reasons You Need to Buy a New Ukuele – psychologists say that people buy based on emotion then search for logical reasons to justify it. That’s certainly true of a lot of uke purchases.

Some Things Just Don’t Catch On

Me (in August 2007): Hey, here’s an idea. Why don’t I do a post with photos of me making stupid faces? And I’ll have a little test-what-you’ve-learnt bit at the end. Wow, everyone’s going to be really engaged with this post. I should do this all the time.

The Internet: Zero comments.

Keep up ukulele players’ well deserved reputation for kindness and generosity and sponser me for my part in the London Uke Fest’s record attempt. A big thanks to Jeff, Josh, Art and Chris(who was incredibly generous) for opening the pot.

My Fingerpicking Ukulele mini-course is looking a bit tired and will be taken down next Friday. So if you’re interested, get in fast. It might be resurrected at some point in the future – possibly as part of an ebook.

Fantastic Moustaches of the World ukulele: Front, Back.

Play along live with the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain at the Albert Hall as part of the Proms. If you can’t wait until then to catch them, you can hear Hester on Radio 4′s The Afternoon Play on Monday and Peter on the album A Psychedelic Guide To Monsterism Island (The POP! Stereo has a track from it available for download).

A story about the rise of the ukulele in Singapore thanks to the efforts of Ukulele Movement.

Another Martin cropped up on Antiques Roadshow. Much more interesting than the last. It’s a one-off spruce top. If you can buy it for the appraised $4,000 bite his arm off – he is underestimating Martin collector’s craziness. (via Ukulelia)

Boy Meets World ukulele: Part 1, Part 2.

MP3s: Craig Robertson covers Ukulelezo. Fong Songs has two MP3s from Ukulele Force including James Hill’s version of Cantina Band. Out the Other has a couple of JuNu tracks.

Exceptionally easy ukulele quiz. I got 100%, bitches. Although it’s not entirely to be trusted: “That’s right. The next largest is the concert, the baritone and then the tenor.”

The Beatles Fest is going after the same mass-ukulele record as the London Uke Fest. They tried the same thing last year and managed 28.

Vertigo Smyth chords on Uker Tabs.

Bette Midler gives the Obama girls a ukulele.

Supermodel Pania Rose plays naked ukulele. Not particularly well, but it would have been remiss of me not to mention it. And she lists her favourite band as Beirut. Keep her away from me. She’d fall in love and it would be one big hassle.

And a whole bunch of naked ukulele models here.

Death Cab for Cutie – Talking Bird (Ukulele Version)(Chords)

Death Cab for Cutie’s new odds-and-ends EP, The Open Door, includes the original ukulele filled version of Talking Bird (you can listen to it on Stereogum). It is, naturally, far superior to the full band version (for which Zakulele has already written up the chords).

Stereogum were, unusually for them, very musically astute to mention Beirut in that post. The song contains a lot of Beirut like touches: it’s in waltz time, the C chord is played up the neck, there are Fadd9 chords all over the place.

I’ve written the chords up in a slightly simplified way (just make sure you pay attention to the C chord – the A string is played at the 7th fret rather than the 3rd). The do occasionally add in passing chords. This sort of thing:

Dent May and His Magnificent Ukulele – Meet Me in the Garden (Chords)

Looks like I’m going to be doing a Beirut on the Dent May album, The Good Feeling Music of….

The album version of Meet Me in the Garden has the uke turned down and guitar and Gainsbourg-ness turned up compared to the demo version but with the 6th and major 7 chords it still keeps a very island theme.

Suggested Strumming Pattern

For the Eb6 and B7M chords:

d – x u d – x u x u x u d u d u

The x’s are chnks (bring the underside of your strumming hand down on the strings to mute them).

For ‘Out by the pond…’:

d – x – u d u

for Eb6 and F6 and just d u d u … for the G.

More Dent May

Oh, Paris! (Chords)
You Can’t Force a Dance Party (Chords)
Love Song 2009 (Chords)

Surely it’s no coincidence that the standout track on the new Beirut EP, March of the Zapotec is the most uke-heavy. The EP isn’t out yet, but The Akara has been spreading on the MP3 blogs.

The uke only part of the track goes like this:

The rest of the song uses these same chords:

More Beirut tabs and chords.

Kate Micucci is playing her ukulele on Scrubs – which is my new favourite ukulele news ever. She discusses her role as Ted’s ukulele sweetheart, Stephanie, here. Until you get a chance to watch it, you’ll have to content yourself Kate and Ted duetting on Screw You a PG version of Fuck You.

Tiki King has a some photos from NAMM including some new Fluke designs, some Les Paul-y type electric ukes from Stagg (with a strange choice of knob placement) and Ohana getting into the ‘oddly placed soundhole’ game.

The new Beirut double EP March of the Zapotech doesn’t have a great deal of ukulele on it (Quiet Color have an MP3 of the uke-heaviest track The Akala). Perhaps because Zach’s had his ukulele stolen.

New York Ukulele Festival is back on again under new management.

The Hull Ukulele Group starts up on 9th February. If you live in the area, sign up for their Facebook group.

More King Blues chords from sam_not_static on Uker Tabs.

Milk Milk Lemonade has an MP3 from The Half Sisters.

Is it ‘ukulele’? Is it ‘ukelele’? There’s only one way to sort this out. FIIIIIIIIIIIGHT!

Do you think playing the ukulele is gay? If anyone asks, tell them your ukulele belongs to your secret girlfriend.