Aloha de Chocobo (Final Fantasy)

Aloha de Chocobo (Tab)

MP3

I’ve been meaning to tab this one out since I did Ukulele de Chocobo. It has a lovely Hawaiian flavoured tune and works very well as a solo ukulele piece (even to those who have never ridden a bright yellow, overside galliforme).

It is possible - and more technically correct - to fingerpick this tune with your thumb on G, index on C, middle on E and ring on A throughout. However, I like to move everything up a string (thumb on C, index on E, middle on A) for bars like two and four.

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Tetris Theme (Solo Version)

Tetris Theme Solo (pdf)

I recently acquired a Fluke and ill-educated people have been confusing it with a balalaika ever since. I’ve given up trying to explain it to them and have learnt to play two Russian sounding tunes on it. The first bit of this video is the tune from Gogol Bordello’s Not A Crime - from a traditional tune called Tromba de Zingari. The second part is a solo version of the Tetris theme.

I’ve tried to retain as much as I could from the duet version - which has made it tricky to play as it shoots around the neck. The trickiest section is bars 5 and 6. Originally I had it tabbed as:

I made it slightly easier for the tab. You can make it easier still by playing it like this:

Which I should have done because I was struggling with this section in the video.

One more hint: in the first bar make sure you fret the A with your third finger so you can play the next few notes more easily.

Tetris Duet

Korobeiniki/Tetris Theme Duet (pdf)

MIDIs: Duet, Ukulele 1, Ukulele 2

I think it’s safe to say that I’ve listened to this tune more than any other over the course of my life. Yet I didn’t even know what it was called until I started researching for this post. The tune is variously called Korobeiniki, Korobeyniki, Korobushka, The Peddlers and ‘that plinky-plonky Tetris music’. The lyrics of the song (written by one Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov in the 19th Century) tell of a young stable-boy who was obsessed with arranging different shaped straw bales as they dropped from the sky.

This duet divides the parts up fairly evenly. The first ukulele takes the main melody and the second plays a counter melody. I’d suggest that you repeat it more than is indicated in the tab, speeding up each time until you’re going at a frantic pace at the end.

“But,” I hear some of you cry, “I have no friends.” No worries. I’m working on a solo version so stay tuned.

Update: The solo tab is here: Tetris (solo)