The Beach Boys – Wouldn’t It Be Nice (Chords)

If you’re quick, you’ve still got time to cast your vote for the 2011 ukulele video of the year. It’s really close between Manitoba Hal and Bella Hemming (just a handful of votes between them at the time of writing). Voted? Right, down to business.

I’ve done plenty of Christmas and Halloween posts but never a Valentines post. And not because I’m one of those people who hates Valentines. But because most love songs – mutual-love songs – are tripe. Not a word you could ever use to describe the Beach Boys’ Wouldn’t It Be Nice.

I wrote up the chords based on the Beach Boys version but She and Him’s version is in the same key and is very similar.

Suggested Strumming

You can use this as the main strumming pattern:

d – d u d u d u

In the verses use it twice for F and once for the Bb. Then split it in half and do d – d u on the Gm7 and d u d u on the C7 (in the She and Him version they do the full pattern for Gm7 and C7

In the bridge and the middle use it once for every chord.

Twiddly Bits

The main reason I wanted to do this song is so I could write up the intro.

Intro

Science Bit

Bollocks to L’Oreal, you can skip the science bit if you’re so inclined.

One small difference between my version and the She and Him version is in the middle section. I’ve gone with the F#m shape for Dmaj7 (2120). Zooey uses 2224. I went with that because I prefer the sound of it with a band playing along. Neither of the versions are particularly good with just uke though. I think I’d go for 7654 for Dmaj7 and 7675 for Gmaj7.