Cabral Estudos Part 2: Masaniello, Galope (Machete Tabs)

Following on from yesterday’s post about the Cabral manuscript, two more C19th pieces for, the uke’s forerunner, the machete.

I say ‘forerunner’ but reading Manuel Morais‘s Colecção de Peças para Machete, the rajão seems like the much more likely candidate. The soprano uke is more like a machete in size and number of strings, but not at all like it in terms of tuning. And I’d say the uke’s re-entrant tuning was its defining characteristic. In that, it’s much more like the 5-string, tenor-ukulele sized rajão which is tuned dgCEA (with re-entrant d- and g-strings).

The difference in tuning between the machete and the uke does cause a few problems. Unlike yesterday’s tunes, today’s don’t transfer directly to a re-entrant uke as pleasingly. They would, however, work well on a low-G uke (with the A-string tuned down to G) or on a baritone (with the E-string tuned down to D). I might well re-arrange them for standard uke sometime.

Again these tabs (worked out from the original manuscript which is public domain) and MP3s are released under a Creative Commons license meaning you can freely play them, record them, adapt them, pass them round or even sell them. I had assumed everyone was familiar with Creative Commons but a comment from plink freud set me straight. I’m more than happy to write a post about my take on Creative Commons – and I might well do that – but you can read the official version here and watch this video.

Masaniello

Masaniello (Tab)

There’s a bit of an anomaly in the original score for this one. Bar 15 is clearly only has enough notes in it for a bar of 3/4. But there’s no indication of a time signature change and you’d expect it to be (indeed it’s very similar to) a repeat of bar 3. I’ve retained it as written in the tab above but here’s a tab with bar 15 repeating bar 3.

Here’s the tab being played by a robot:

Masaniello (MP3)