The Troggs/Jimi Hendrix – Wild Thing

You wouldn’t believe how many people turn up at this blog after searching for ‘wild thing ukulele tabs‘ and leave disappointed. Well, no more.

The song was written by Chip Taylor, later recorded by The Troggs but probably most famous in the guitar-burning Hendrix version. All three of those versions are in different keys (Taylor in E, Troggs in A and Hendrix in Ab) and, as luck would have it, none of those keys make for easy beginner chords on the ukulele.

About Transposing

For the most part, playing guitar chords on the ukulele isn’t a problem. The chords for guitar are the same as the chords for ukulele – if the chord is A for the guitar, it’s A for the ukulele as well. However, sometimes the guitar chords are awkward to play on the uke. If this is the situation, you can move the chords around to make them fit more comfortably on the uke. This is known as transposing.

The version of Wild Thing above shows the chords The Troggs used and is in the key of A (i.e. A is the chord where the song feels settled). It includes the E chord which uke players always hate. You can get round this by moving all the chords up or down the same number of frets so it’s in a new key. The most uke friendly keys are C, G and F.

For Wild Thing, the first version I wrote out is in A and this version is in G:

Wild Thing (Chords in G)

Since G is two frets lower than A, you have to move all the chords down two frets. So the D chord becomes a C chord, the E chord becomes a D chord and the G chord becomes an F chord.

There’s a very handy automatic chord transposing website that makes this easy. You just throw in the chord sheet, tell it what key you want the chords to be in and it’ll spit out the new chord sheet.