After writing about her on Monday, I immediately started working on this tune and was given a further boot up the backside by Susan ex-Tobacco.
The song is fairly easy-going on the left hand. You don’t need your left hand at all for vast parts of it. The right hand might require a little more work. Carlyle uses her thumb to play all the notes. This works well enough for most of the song but, I have to say, verges on the utterly insane for the tremolo section (the ‘Oh my God, I can hardly breathe section’). She just about manages to pull it off but I strongly recommend you use your index finger. This will make the timing much easier to control.
On second thoughts, if you’re in the US don’t buy it there – the import price is the equivalent of launching a rudimentary space program. Get it on iTunes instead.
You may not recognise the name ‘Alan Hawkshaw’ but if you live in the UK you’ll certainly be familiar with his music. As well as writing the classic Grange Hill theme, he also came up with the bada-bada-biddly-do-boooo for Countdown.
The 70’s was the golden age of TV theme making. Today, they all seem to be tuneless slabs of thudding beats. I must have heard the Big Brother theme tune hundreds of times but I can never remember how it goes. I suspect I’ll still be able to hum the Grange Hill theme and the Rhubarb and Custard theme on my death-bed.
The Grange Hill theme isn’t particularly uke friendly but I enjoy playing it and it will always get a giggle from Brits of a certain age. I’ve tabbed it out for one uke but there are at least three guitars playing on the original. If you have a uke-playing friend, get them to play the riff in bars 2 and 3 over bars 4 to 8. If, like me, you have no friends, you could attempt to combine the two parts – playing the riff during the long rests – or miss out that section entirely.
My recent Fluke acquisition reminded me of the video for Beirut’s Elephant Gun. While I was checking it out, I came across this impromptu performance Postcards From Italy and decided I had to work out the song.
Beirut mainman Zach Condon’s choice of ukulele wasn’t entirely voluntary. In an interview with Pitchfork he explained that after falling of a bridge age 14, “my left wrist is an inch-and-a-half shorter than my [right one] and doesn’t quite have the mobility to wrap around a guitar neck without a bit of pain.” I’d say falling off a bridge was a small price to pay for avoiding the fate of becoming a guitar player.
Postcards From Italy is divided into two halves. The first half has this riff repeated:
If you’d rather strum chords through this section, moving between F and A will do it for you.
As the lyrics shift from the nostalgia in the first half of the song to the anticipation of the second half, so the music shifts with it. There is a small correction I would make to the fingering of the chords in the chart. It suggests playing the C chord with your third finger. But using you pinkie (little finger) allows for a much easier transition into the Bbadd9. You could keep your pinky there through all the chords (creating a Dm7 rather than Dm). It creates an effective drone through the chord changes.
The rhythm for this second section is not played the same every time, but I play the basic pattern like this:
The up arrows indicated down strums and the down arrows indicate up strums (don’t look at me, I didn’t invent the system).
Here’s the rhythm played slowly, then up to tempo.
I’ve been playing with Yahoo Pipes again. This time I’ve set up a pipe which, in theory at least, lets you search a number of video websites (including Midnight Ukulele Disco) for ukulele videos.
The Ukulele Video Search Pipe searches for ukulele videos on: Midnight Ukulele Disco, Google Video, YouTube, Yahoo! Video, Metacafe, Dailymotion, Break. The term ‘ukulele’ is already embedded in the pipe.
All you have to do is type in the number of results you want to see and the person or song you want. For example, 30 results and ‘Craig Robertson’ will return his videos on MUD and YouTube.
Unfortunately, Yahoo Pipes is in beta and I’m not all that proficient on it so this pipe is quite temperamental. The pipe originally contained the site Grouper but when I searched for ‘Craig Robertson’ it had a disturbing tendency to point to a man being kicked in the balls (NSFW – unless you work in Abu Ghraib).
Video Search: If for some inexplicable reason you want to find a video which doesn’t include a ukulele, you can search using this tube.
The eagle-eyed obsessives amongst you may have noticed a few changes around here recently:
I have set up a Tab & Chords Page with songs listed alphabetically rather than in the unhelpful date order.
There’s a Contact Page where you can send me an email directly from the site.
You can now read Uke Hunt by email by putting your address in the form below or in the sidebar. Or you can subscribe to the feed by clicking the orange button in the sidebar or the big one to the right. This takes you to a page where you can select your chosen reader and sign up. If you’ve no idea what I’m on about, read this introduction to feeds and immediately improve your life forever.
There are some inventions so perfect and unlikely that their inception can only be put down to a moment of pure genius. For example, who was it who first stood on beach, looked down at the sand and thought, “You know, I reckon if we melt that down we could see through that.”? And who was it that got so bored one winter’s evening that they went rummaging through the tool shed and decided to play a saw with a violin bow and created a ghostly wail. Luckily for us they did as musical saw and ukulele make a near perfect combination.
The British electronic music scene isn’t the first place you’d expect to find a saw and ukulele player but the entire genre can be justified for producing one, Mara Carlyle. Carlyle has appeared on records by Plaid and Matthew Herbert. Her scene stealing vocals quickly earned her a record deal. She released her debut album, The Lovely (sadly not a Debbie McGee concept album), in 2004 and the fantastically named EP I Blame Dido a year later.
But she first came to to my notice with her uke and saw version of Jamie Lidell’s Game for Fools (which appeared on his album of remixes Muliply Additions). The original version of the song is an Otis Reading style but from Carlyle’s version you’d think it was written for ukulele. It’s a masterclass in ukeing up song.
Once you’ve mastered the Earlyguard piece I posted before this would be the perfect follow-up. It uses similar techniques but in a more complicated way.
The introduction to this piece always reminds me of Earlyguard’s fellow German Beethoven. The tune then moves into picking notes across the strings. This time in groups of three and two as well as all four. The tempo of this piece changes a great deal and to help play the faster sections, rather than play all notes with the thumb as in Blue Smoke, he plucks the A-string with his index finger. This gives his thumb more time to move to the next set of notes. If you want to make it easier still, you could pluck each string with a different finger
Written down, this piece looks like just a series of arpeggios. But listen to Earlyguard playing it and it’s clear that it’s full of melody. Be sure to accentuate the melody notes. These are the notes played on the lowest string except in bars 20 and 21 where they are on the 1st string.
Israel “IZ” Kamakawiwo’ole isn’t going to let being dead for a decade slow him down. He has just released new album, Wonderful World. The album features classic IZ tracks with a full orchestral backing. I’m not sure how much an orchestra will add to his music. He’s at his best when it’s just him and his uke. The video of his performance of White Sandy Beach at Amazon is absolutely captivating.
George Hinchcliff of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain was interviewed on News 24 whilst images of death and destruction were flashed up behind him.
