Bacharach and David – Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head (Instrumental Tab)
Continuing the Hal David tribute with Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head. Not particularly a lyrical highlight of his but it did have a ukulele in. At least the original version did. It was replaced by a guitar in the rejiggered version.
I’ve kept the arrangement simple enough that it can be played with your thumb. Although I’m using flick-ups in my version.
That is until the end section. That bit is very silly (that’s why I included it) so you’d be well within your rights just to ditch it.
I’m a big fan of Uke of Carl’s arrangements of various theme tunes for ukulele. A while back I had him write a guest post with a bunch of his tabs. Now’s he’s launched his own website and a series of ebooks so I asked him to write another guest post. And he was kind enough to do just that.
I didn’t begin life as a Ukulele player. I started off on the guitar, and like many have, gravitated toward the Uke. Despite being a metal head at heart, I couldn’t help but be drawn to the Spanish guitar sound. One day I was lucky enough to stumble upon the Julio S, Sagreras Guitar Method and it changed the way I looked at the instrument. For this book, I’ve taken a few of his exercises and tried to do something new with them. I’ve changed some keys to be more Uke friendly, played around with the time signatures and chopped them up so they are almost entirely new pieces.
This book is suited to the beginner who is up for a challenge and for the more advanced player looking to add further tunes to their repertoire.
This one was tricky begin with, as there are so many great Classical pieces to choose from. However, I scoured my library and carefully picked 8 pieces which I then adapted for the Uke. Classical guitarists will be familiar with many of these pieces but even if you haven’t heard them before, you’ll find them pleasing to the ear. It’s a well paced book which begins with some simple pieces and develops into something a little more challenging.
This is the perfect compliment to book one. It features a further 8 pieces of varying levels. I’ve kept it quite diverse with regard to composers and have chosen memorable pieces from, amongst others, Sor, Giuliani, Carulli and Tarrega. These pieces will really test your playing skills and will serve as ideal party pieces once you master them.
There’s something about Jewish music and, in particular, Klezmer that gets me excited. I play a lot of it on my Clarinet and when I scoured the web for Ukulele pieces, I found very few. That’s when the idea for this book came to me. It was a pleasure researching this one. As well as the obvious, ‘Hava Nagila’, I’ve included ‘Hatikvah’ ‘Dance of Delight’ and ‘Ez Pachach’, which is my own composition. You’ll have great fun with this book. There are some challenges but even a beginner will be able to play through some of the pieces.
Hopefully there’s plenty to choose from here and you might find something you’ve not tried before. Make sure you subscribe to my site for future updates. I have a couple of more books in the works and have only just finished the tab for ‘Mr. Benn’ and ‘Duck Tales’, which will appear very soon.
Thanks to Al for this opportunity. Without his encouragement I wouldn’t have had half the publicity I’ve had. Also thanks for the inspiration. When I first saw this, I thought, ‘It can be done!’ and I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve seen this.
A tribute to Hal David with two Bacharach and David songs this week. Starting off with my favourite Anyone Who Had a Heart. The Americans got Dionne Warwick’s version and us Brits got the Cilla Black version. I’m not going to argue with anyone who thinks Cilla’s version is better (even though they’re clearly wrong) but I’ve written up the Dionne Warwick version.
It’s a pretty tricky song to keep up with. Lots of barre chords to contend with. And the chords move back and forth quickly in the chorus. Which doesn’t translate to ukulele too well. You could simplify the chorus to this:
If you are looking for suggested strumming on this one you’re shit out of luck, I’m afraid. I only go into the strumming on the beginner/improver level stuff. And this certainly isn’t. There’s an interesting section in the book Burt Bacharach: Song by Song discussing the various polyrhythms and time signature changes. None of which are the way I hear the song. As you can tell from the twiddly bit.
Twiddly Bit
This little twiddle approximates what’s going on with all the strings in the chorus. It sounds like this:
Incredibly Serious Warning: There are two songs here made famous by Maroon 5.
For any of you brave enough to continue, this week has a great new song from Laura Marling (bet you can’t guess what make of ukulele she’s playing). Also, off of Once, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová in separate videos. And two videos from Mexico: Natalia Lafourcade and uke-adjacent action from Al Guatimé Strike.
The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain’s performance at the Royal Albert Hall prompted a flurry of press interest. No surprises that the only one that’s interesting and doesn’t drop the F-bomb was written by George himself. Here he is discussing adapting Terry Riley’s In C for ukulele. You can glimpse the results here and download the score in the underbar.
I was completely unaware of Lute of Noah from Final Fantasy III before I got a couple of requests for it. But as soon as I heard it I knew it’s make a great campanella ukulele piece.
And it does work out really well. The tune is triplets all the way through. Just make sure you’ve got all the strings fretted for that triplet at the start of each triplet. For example, in bar 4 you’ll fret the E and A strings at the 7th fret at the start of the first triplet; then the g, C and E strings at the fifth fret at the start of the second triplet and so on.
There’s only one place where the “no consecutive notes on the same string” rule makes things tricky. In the first triplet of bar 3 you have to stretch quite a bit. If you’re okay with breaking the campanella rules you can replace the 12th fret, g-string with 10th fret A-string.
In the original version the tempo varies wildly. I’ve kept the tempo variation but made it a bit more subtle. If your fingers are nimble enough, feel free to keep up with the original.
Judging by the amount of ‘I’m listening to’ stuff clogging up Facebook, Spotify has really caught on. And it’s now available in the countries the blog is most popular in (sorry Canada, Singapore and Brazil). Which is good because I’m a big Spotify fan and am forever fiddling with playlists. And I’ve put together a bunch of ukulele playlists.
If you’re not familiar with Spotify, it’s an app that will let you listen to most music released for free (if you’re willing to put up with ads – I pay for it to get rid of them). You can download it here.
For each playlist I’ve included a link to the playlist, a plain list tracklist and the fancy-dan Spotify doodad. If you’re reading by email or reader you might need to visit the blog to see the doodads.
If you’ve made a ukulele Spotify playlist let me know in the comments and I’ll add a link to the post. And leave a comment if there’s something I’ve egregiously left out of one of the lists.
With Mumford and two of his sons toting Mya-Moe ukes I was hoping to find some ukulele action on their new album. No such luck though. If there’s any there, I missed it.
Nonetheless, the lead single from the album is pretty great and – with the addition of a capo – works well on uke. If you don’t want to use a capo you can play along with the live version which is one fret lower.
Suggested Strumming
The strumming gets a bit involved. You can follow the guitar you can use this half bar pattern
d – d – – u d –
So the second down is long and the up is short (and accented). So played twice it’s this:
Intro and Bridge Twice for Am and G. Once for C, F, C and two for G the first time and four the second.
Verse Four times for each chord.
Chorus Four times for C, twice for Em, twice for G. (Eight times on the C chord after the first chorus).
Middle Three on C, one on Cmaj7, three on the Am, one on F and C, two on G.
The dynamics on this one smell like Teen Spirit. If you’re playing this on just uke it’s worth dropping down to just one down strum per chord in the quiet bits.
