Tallest Man on Earth is probably my favourite act at the moment. So much so I’m considering a rare field-trip schlepping to Salford to watch him play here. So it didn’t take too many requests to get me to tab up this song.
Open-F Tuning
He plays the song in open-C tuning with a capo at the 8th fret. To mimic that you can tune to open F (fCFA) by tuning the g-string down a whole step and the E-string up half a step.
Tab and standard notation intended for high-G tuning (although 13 of them can be played on baritone or low-G according to the book) for
Ahi Wela (which you can download tab for on his site)
All Through the Night
Aloha ‘Oe
Blue ‘Ukulele Blues
Danny Boy
Dona Nobis Pacem
E Ku’u Morning Dew
Galiarde
Gaviotas
Greensleeves
Hilo March
Isa Lei
Kaulana Na Pua
Las Mananitas
Mbube (Wimoweh)
Minuet
Minuet in G
New Spanish Fandango
Over the Rainbow
Planxty Irwin
Pua Sadinia
The Ragged Little Flea
The Southwind
Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star
Wehiwehi ‘Oe
As the title suggests, it’s all fingerpicking.
It comes with a CD with a recording of each arrangement (but no tuning notes).
You get brief guides to reading music and tab (probably not enough if you’re entirely new to them but a decent reference) and fingerpicking; performance notes for each piece and a list of chord inversions.
The Good Stuff
Perfect for Intermediates: I think this is the best book around for intermediate players who are experienced with chords and want to start tackling fingerpicking pieces. Each track has some performance notes that are going to offer you some guidance.
And the tunes are arranged fairly simply.
There’s a lot of crossover between the tunes in this book and those in, the more advanced, John King’s Classical Ukulele. They make for an interesting comparison. Here are the opening bars of Greensleeves arranged in Fingerstyle Solos (at the top) and Classical Ukulele (at the bottom) in the same key.
Mark Nelson’s version is much easier to play but less elegant.
Mbube (aka Wimoweh aka The Lion Sleeps Tonight) and Over the Rainbow: Easily my two favourite arrangements in the book. Over the Rainbow is particularly useful for occasions when someone you want to impress requests it.
FYI: Using Over the Rainbow to impress a potential suitor: acceptable. Using I’m Yours or Hey, Soul Sister to impress a potential suitor: entirely unacceptable. Using Wimoweh to impress a potential suitor: very much encouraged.
The Not So Good Stuff
Lack of Variety: You might have noticed I like to play uptempo tunes. Unfortunately, Fingerstyle Solos for ‘Ukulele is very heavy towards the slow, light tunes. There’s very little fast tempo stuff.
Not always carefully arranged: Some of the position choices in the book completely baffle me. For example, here are the opening notes for Planxty Irwin:
I can’t see any reason for that big jump between 3rd and 8th fret when you could play the C note much more easily on the g or E strings.
I have found myself rearranging a lot of the tunes in the book to suit my own style. Not necessarily a bad thing.
Overall
Definitely a recommended book for people looking to start of fingerpicking. Also a lot of fun to use as a basis for your own arrangements of tunes.
You can get a free arrangement from the book on his site.
How adorable is Darren Hanlon in this video? So adorable I want to pinch his cheeks, ruffle his hair and give him 20p for Sherbet Dip.
Good news: Darren’s latest album, I Will Love You At All, (from which this song is off of) has been picked up by Yep Roc Records. Making him label-mates with fellow ukers Peggy Sue.
I’ve written the chords up as they’re played (with barre chords) but they sound perfectly good if you want to use the standard versions.
Suggested Strumming
For most of the song you can use this once for each chord:
But you need to be careful in the bridges and the third line of the chorus (on the F chord). There you can use all down strums.
Twiddly Bit
My favourite bit of the song is this little run using thirds:
A lack of visual appeal from some of this week’s videos with Wendall Hall and May Singhi Breen hailing from a time before Flips and webcams. No such excuse for Clock Opera who put up a teaser video for this song ages ago but I’ve waited and there’s still nothing.
The rest of the videos are, of course, a feast for the eyes with people who are uniformly radiant as a sunrise made flesh.
Aquila are bringing out a new type of string that they’re calling Bionylon (isn’t that what Wonder Woman’s tights were made of?). Ken Middleton has been testing them out along with the Nylguts – but is keeping us in the dark as to which is which for now.
The Uke Hunt Podcast is up on iTunes (or just search for ‘uke hunt’ on iTunes) so you can subscribe and have every episode delivered straight to you. If you enjoyed the first episode, I’d be really grateful if you could leave a review on there.
MP3s: Quite a few people were enamoured of Matt Griffo’s narwhal/unicorn song last week. You can get it free on his Bandcamp. The best track on the Amanda Palmer Radiohead EP is the one without any ukulele.
Two rarities in this post: me doing an instrumental arrangement of a vocal track and, horror of horrors, me smiling.
It’s no surprise that’s it’s the second one of these that everyone has commentedupon. So much so I thought I should skip the tabs and doing a smiling tutorial instead.
I highly recommend watching this video and painstakingly recreating that radiant natural smile of hers whilst applying lashings of Frownies. Try not to get those crow’s feet.
When I say ‘essential’, I’m not just talking about records that are nice to listen to. All these records have changed the way I think about making music on the ukulele. They’ve inspired me to try something new, to be more ambitious in my playing or to think about the instrument in a new way.
This is my personal choice. So, if you think I’m an idiot, let me know what I’ve left out (or shouldn’t have included) in the comments and why it deserves to be here.
In no particular order:
James Hill – A Flying Leap
He’s got more tasteful and understated with his recent albums but I love this one for its spirit of , “Hey, Mum, look how high I can swing.” There’s an unrelenting enthusiasm to the entire album. Tunes like Uke Talk and Down Rideau Canal blast along like he’s desperate to play every note on the uke in as short a time as possible. He’s got total command of his ukulele and he’s enjoying every second of it.
With highly skilled players of any instrument there’s a tendency to sacrifice enjoyable tunes for technical wizardry but A Flying Leap doesn’t fall into that trap. Even a quite pretentious idea like the One Small Suite for ‘Ukulele is packed with hummable tunes.
James hasn’t made any secret of the fact he’s a bit jaded with the ukulele at the moment and, really, where do you go after an album like this?
The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain – Live in London #1 and #2
If you tour for 25 years, you tend to become a pretty good live act. And there’s no doubt that the UOGB are best experienced live (they’re currently up there with Dillinger Escape Plan and AC/DC as my favourite gigs). These two albums pack in all the hits (with the merciful exception of Smells Like Teen Spirit) along with the atmosphere and jokes as old as the band.
As a nerd, what fascinates me about these records are the arrangements. Most uke groups just have most people strumming the same chord while a couple of flash-Harry’s have at it. But their arrangements are crafted.
If someone had asked me a few years ago what I’d most like to hear I’d probably have said, “MIA covering Frank Zappa on a ukulele,” and I would be imagining something a lot like tuNE-yArdDS. Connecting TUne-YArds to those to is the masses of ideas they cram in each track and their ability to combine sometimes wildly avant-guard sounds to make something enjoyable, listenable and popular.
The Luddite part of me thinks every album should be made this way. Write some great songs, get together a bunch of great musicians, sit them around a single mic and give them a day to produce something incredible. Miss Jess followed that tactic and it paid off spectacularly with this record.
Jake Shimabukuro is idolised by many ukers for his individuality and originality. Which is why they try to play like him.
After the effects- and instrument- heavy Dragon, Gently Weeps is much more open and direct. Other instruments don’t get a look in until towards the end (where they make the sound much more cheesy). The album is the perfect showcase for Jake’s ability and contains some captivating performances.
Jake has such an individual and recognisable style it’s a shame that he inspires more people to imitate him than he inspires to find their own style.
Standout track: No one agrees with me on this but my favourite is Grandma’s Groove.
Buy It: On Amazon
Beirut – Gulag Orkestar
“Yeah, I’m in a band. I play guitar. And Billy’s on drums. And Mike on bass.” Oh, piss off.
With all the incredible instruments in the world it baffles me why 95% of bands just stick with the obvious. By the simple expedient of using brass, ukuleles and accordions, Zach Condon makes music far more interesting and captivating than most of his contemporaries.
It’s tricky writing songs that are timeless without being retro. It helps to be an impossibly talented songwriter. And that voice. Being something of a white-trash thug myself, I can’t resist the posh voice.
Since the Peggy Sue interview I’ve had a steady stream of requests to do this song and I’ve finally caved. There’s a lot going on in the song so no blather.
Chords
There’s quite a lot of dissonance in the chords. The Fadd9 has an F, G and Ab in – three notes in the space of four frets. C7M isn’t a discord by itself, but the B note doesn’t belong in the key of Fm so it sounds really nasty in context (F – B is the Devil’s Interval).
Suggested Strumming
For the first part of the song the strumming is:
d – d u – u d u
– u d u – u d u
When the extra C chord comes in use the first bar once for the C5 and C chords.
Then in verse 2 the chords come at twice the rate. For which you can use this strum:
Apart from the single strum section, that should see you through the strumming.
Twiddly Bits
The time signature switches to 6/8 in the middle for this little bit:
Requested by J-Hob, Francesca and a few dozen people called Sophie.
YouTube must be having some serious problems lately. I’ve seen all sorts of loading errors, my latest video took hours to publish and all my subscriptions disappeared. So my apologies if I’ve missed anything earth-shattering.
Nevertheless, there’s menagerie of videos this week including songs about narwhals and unicorns, blackbirds and dik-diks.
