Billy Corgan/Smashing Pumpkins – Baby (Chords)

I was quite impressed by Billy Corgan’s ukulele playing. He certainly seems to take it more seriously than most of the guitarists who jump on the bandwagon and make a hash of it. For a start, he isn’t using a pick. And he throws in some classic ukulele stuff like diminished chords and a triplet strum. It’s enough to forgive him for playing a Fender and braiding Jessica Simpson’s prayers.

The reason, as can be heard in the full intro to the song, is that he learnt ukulele from a Hawaiian friend. Nice work, Hawaiian Corgan-buddy!

Suggested Strumming

The strumming skips around quite a bit so I’m not going to go through all of it. This is the main one:

d – x u d u x –

Do that for each chord in the verse until the end D7 – G7. Here you get a typical Hawaiian turnaround. Here the C chord doesn’t quite fill the bar. Instead of the final ‘-‘ on the C chord you do an up strum on the D7 chord. So you strum this:

u d u –

And the same for the G7 chord.

In the chorus it’s all triplet strums on the C – Fm moves.

Now taking tab requests for this.

Buy Smumpkins stuff. (If you don’t own Siamese Dream, what are you playing it?)