Bill Withers – Ain’t No Sunshine (Tab)
Following on from Lean on Me with another much-requested Bill Withers song.
The song itself is neatly split between the melody and the strumming. Which makes for an easy transition to uke. So you have only melody notes in bars 1 and 3 (played with the index and middle fingers). Then the open g-string which functions as both the melody note (on “Gone”) and the root note of the Gm chord.
For the chord bars (e.g. two and four) I’m plucking the individual notes with my thumb, then strumming the chord.
Bars 5, 6 and 7 start out with chords then switch to melody notes. In bars 6 and 7, I’m bending the Bb note (A-string, 1st fret) slightly sharp to give it a bit of feeling.
That’s it for the verses. The only other part of the song is the “I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know…” section which I’ve cut down to just two bars. That’s topped off with a bluesy pentatonic run up the neck before returning to the verse.
