Musicguymic has new KoAloha Sopranino ukuleles. Only nineteen and a half inches long. Aww bless.

San Francisco’s MoCFA is currently holding an exhibition on the Evolution of the Ukulele. It includes a two day ukulele festival featuring Jake Shimabukuro, The Paper Dolls and many others. If you can’t make it, you can still read another excellent article by John King.

Temporarily Distraught has the artwork and tracklisting for the forthcoming Beirut album.

BlipTV has an interview and performance from UOoGB and mad ukulele/bikini skills.

Hipsters/dupes can tune their ukuleles with their iPhones.

BKLYN Song of the Day has an mp3 of Bob Brozman and Rene Lacaille collaboration. Highly recommended.

Fretboard Journal alerts us to the danger that scented plugins pose to the happiness of your instrument.

Flame On! Rock Uke – a death metal ukulele.

Jenny Flame of Ukulele Nation has discovered a family history of ukulele. She was digging around in old family photos when she came across these two amazing photos of her great aunt in the 1940’s. It’s quite clear her great aunt knew how to rock the ukulele and tilted hat look back in the day.

SophiSoph – Smile (mp3) via her MySpace

Friend of the blog, Brian Osmucon emailed me this morning to let me know about his daughter’s music and blow me down if she isn’t great. As well as having a knockout voice, she’s chosen as excellent song to transfer to the uke in the form of Lily Allen’s Smile.

It doesn’t harm that the song only has two chords (Gm and F).

Lily Allen has a habit of writing songs that only have two chords – it gives her more time to spend on her true passion of kicking people down and stabbing them in the ear. LDN is another song with just two chords. This time F and C. You can play them in the usual open position, but if you play them this way:

Then you can recreate the guitar stabs by releasing the pressure from the chords (but keeping your fingers on the strings) just after each strum.

And if you want to play the intro, give this a bash:

Buy Alright, Still US UK

A quick round up of the most popular tabs on Uke Hunt in its three months of life in case you happen to have missed something important.

1. Beirut – Postcards From Italy

2. While My Guitar Gently Weeps

3. 12th Street Rag

4. Pink Panther

5. The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

6. Rigk Sauer – Tequila

7. Brian Hefferan – The Entertainer

8. Brian Hefferan – Sailors Hornpipe

9. Earlyguard – Blue Smoke

10. Tetris duet

There’s a list of all the tabs and chords on this page.

Flight of the Conchords – Mermaids (Chords)

I woke up this morning to an excited email from Uke Hunt’s official FotC correspondent Jenny Flame telling me that last Sunday’s episode featured a ukulele song. I immediately dashed over to YouTube, stole the lyrics and started working out the chords.

After Jemaine’s appearance with a ukulele earlier in the series, it was the turn of Bret “Bret Bret” McKenzie (also of the Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra) to strum the uke. Although he didn’t bother playing the uke with his left hand (I assume it’s a parody of something).

Once you get passed the intro, the song itself only has two chords. The chords have names that sound like a chemical compound but don’t let that put you of. To play a Bm7, you bar your finger across all the strings at the second fret – make sure your thumb is behind the fingerboard to give you something to press against. The Amaj7 is like a normal A chord but with the g string played at the first rather than second fret.

Once you’ve got that chord change down, the only challenge is singing the song without bursting out laughing.

Buy The Distant Future US UK

Grass Stains (mp3)
You’re In Love Again Dirty Version (mp3)
Brains, Brains (mp3)via creebobby.com

Jacob Borshard has a few celebrity fans me (obviously), Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore. Borshard won a song contest for the film Music and Lyrics (allegedly judged by stars of the film Grant and Barrymore) with the song Grass Stains. As a promotional tool, it easily beat the film’s other promotional gimmick: make your own 80s glam band.

After winning the contest, he made this sexy video for it – entirely by himself and without even a digital camera – and earned himself a restraining order barring him from, “Portland Public School property or any adjacent sidewalk for one calendar year,” while shooting it. (NOTE: if the police start asking you why you’re hanging around a school, “I’m making a video,” isn’t the best defence.)

It’s easy to see why they picked Borshard as the winner. His songs are full of charm, witty lyrics and adorable melodies. Those three so often go along with the ukulele.

You can download both of Borshard’s albums entirely free on his website. The lyrics for the Last Brontosaurus album on his site also have the chords for all the tunes and you can pick up the chords for a couple of tunes in a more easy to follow form on Mike’s Ukulele Page.

A couple of weeks ago I tabbed out a version of this song for two ukuleles and I couldn’t resist the challenge of doing it on one.

I combined the two parts in the simplest way I could think of: by only playing the background riff when there were no melody notes. There are two tricky parts to getting this: keeping the groove and distinguishing the melody notes from the riff. There are parts where the melody cuts across the riff in awkward ways (such as in bars 7 and 8 ) and I need some practice before I could fall naturally back into the riff. I also found the phrasing in bar 20 a little unnatural. Counting the beats (1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &) and playing on the ‘1 &’ and the ‘4 &’ helped me sort it out.

I separated the melody from the riff by dampening the strings a little on the riff notes (i.e. resting the flabby bit at the bottom of my right hand against the strings very lightly) and giving the melody notes an extra bit of welly.

WS64 has done a great version of this tune. He incorporates more chord notes than I did. I particularly like his strummed sections. I like them so much I’m going to steal the idea.

The best of the week’s uke performances over the fold – including an earth-shattering performance by Tessie O’Shea and Jake coming over all Spinal Tap.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ukulelenurkka will be celebrating International Ukulele Day (August 23rd) in Helsinki with two days worth of top-notch gigs. Appearances from Ukulelezaza, Pete Howlett, Shelley Rickey and Scheidenbach.

After I mentioned the Tay Zonday’s viral hit video Chocolate Rain in connection with this performance, WS64 produced a fantastic ukulele version of the song. Tay Zonday and WS64 – Chocolate Rain (mp3)

A couple of atmospheric photos of Amanda Palmer and one of her many surprise ukulele performances.

Learn how to tie your ukulele strings extra firmly from the knot experts.

Mix Me A Molotov has a live mp3 of UOoGB performing Anarchy in the UK. Ukulele mp3s galore at Ochblog.

The Independent can’t resist a terrible ukulele pun either and reveals that Pete Doherty has, apparently, bought a uke.

Tedtoons of the Nashville Ukulele Society has two hilarious uke ecards: kitty ukulele and frog ukulele.

More painted ukes.

New ukulele LiveJournal group.

A ukulele playing Des O’Connor. Not that Des O’Connor.

Fluke played atop a camel.

Desperate rappers turn to Tiny Tim.

Of all the ten commandments, the one I find most difficult to live by is, “Thy shalt not covet thy neighbour’s uke.” I’ve often found myself browsing eBay or YouTube, ogling the ukes of others and contemplating harvesting the organs of my uglier children to raise the cash to buy one. But my moral compass got the better of me. So how do you get a better sounding ukulele without shelling out for one?

1. Holding the ukulele

I’ve seen it suggested that you should hold the uke by smushing it into your chest; that is entirely the wrong way to go about it. Being so small, it’s easy to smother all the tone out of a ukulele. You want to be touching the ukulele as little as possible. You need to allow the front and back of the uke to vibrate as much as possible to wring all the tone and volume out of it as possible.

Watch how the masters like Jake Shimabukuro and Roy Smeck hold it. They have the uke angled away from the body and their forearm resting very gently on the corner of the uke. The area of the uke they are touching is very small and mostly limited to the corners.

2. Use good strings

The quality of strings you use can have a huge effect on the sound of the ukulele. Buying top of the range strings is far more affordable than buying a top of the range uke and can yield almost as much of an improvement in tone. Aquila and Worth strings are generally considered the best ukulele strings around. But I still love my pink KoAloha strings. Find more about ukulele strings here.

3. Find the sweet spot

The place where you strum the uke can have a big impact on how it sounds. If you strum close to the bridge (where the strings are tied on), then you’ll get a very thin, reedy sound. Each uke has it’s own sweet spot but it’s usually somewhere around the point where the neck meets the body.

4. Don’t use a guitar pick.

The number one mistake guitar players make when transferring to uke is hacking away at the uke strings with a thumping great rhino’s toenail. Guitar plectrums are far too hard for nylon uke strings (you can just about get away with it on steel strings) and as a consequence they make a harsh sound. If you have to use a pick, use the dedicated ukulele felt picks.

5. Look after your uke.

Ukes react very badly to humidity. If you’ve got a cheap instrument you may not want to fork out for a humidifier but don’t leave your uke on a sunny windowsill or near a heater. The latest edition of UkeCast (episode 222 – the number of a third of the beast) has a list of tips for looking after your uke (I did not know that suncream can damage ukuleles).

So you might not be able to make a Mahalo sound like a vintage Martin ukulele (that was just an excuse for a very tenuous pun) but you can certainly improve the sound it makes.

Do you have have any other tone tips?

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain‘s latest album, Precious Little, contains a version of this song (made famous by Nancy Sinatra’s version on the Kill Bill Soundtrack) but they’re not the first to do it on the uke. Former Miss France, Mareva Galanter did a ukulele version on her Ukuyeye album (which combined two of my musical loves that I never thought I’d see together) she also has the only flash website so cool it doesn’t make me run away and look at a blank sheet of paper for half an hour.

Ukulele Boogaloo has the chords and tab for the intro but the way they’ve written up the intro strikes me as crazy. It makes more sense to play it this way:

At the start of the intro bar your index finger across the third fret and leave it there until bar 4. Let as many notes as possible ring into each other – to recreate the sound of the original. The notes in brackets are ‘ghost notes’ i.e. played more softly than the others. These aren’t fully part of the tune but help to support it – it’s your choice whether to play them or not.

Buy Kill Bill Soundtrack US UK

(that must be the first time I’ve anything cheaper in the UK than in the US)