Uke Hunt turned 15 years old a few months ago. Meaning it’s lasted 14 years longer than I expected. According to WebMD a 15 year olds may, “Get taller and more muscular.” Which is something to look forward to.

A massive shoutout to everyone who has generously supported the site via Patreon over the last year. Not only are they the reason the site is still up and running, they’ve also suggested almost all the tabs I’ve done (and 100% of the popular ones).

Here’s a round-up of my favourite tabs and the goings-on of the last year.

May 2021

– Ukuleles had the largest percentage increase in sales of sales of any instrument during the pandemic.

In tabs: Phil Collins’s In the Air Tonight, Cat Stevens’ Morning Has Broken, U2’s With or Without You and, if you’re feeling fancy, Schumann’s Vanitas Vanitatum Mit Humor

Patreon tab: Alicia Keys – If I Ain’t Got You

June 2021

In tabs: A very folk/country month with Bob Dylan, Iris Dement and Ryan Adams and some TV stuff with Parks and Rec and Taskmaster.

Patreon tab: Jose Gonzalez – Heartbeats

July 20201

– The Big Chord Quiz 7
– Sam and Fred Kamaka got Congressional Medals and Biden nominates Jake Shimabukuro.
– Best videos of the year so far.

In tabs: R.E.M. – Losing My Religion, Travis – Why Does It Always Rain on Me?, Beyonce – Halo and a medley of Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World and Sam Cooke’s Wonderful World

Patreon tab: Pink Floyd – Comfortably Numb

August 2021

– Seven Movies About Music You Haven’t Seen.

In tabs: The Beatles – Till There Was You,
Portishead – Glory Box, Sufjan Stevens – Casimir Pulaski Day and Guns N’ Roses – Patience

Patreon tab: Nina Simone – I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free

September 2021

– SpaceX launch a ukulele into orbit.

In tabs: A David Lynch double bill with In Heaven from Eraserhead and Roy Orbison’s Crying (from Mulholland Drive). Plus David Bowie – Space Oddity and Frank and Nancy Sinatra – Something Stupid.

Patreon tab: Eric Clapton – Tears in Heaven

October 2021

In tabs: For the spooky season: Zombie by The Cranberries and The Buffy the Vampire Slayer Theme. And a Dolly double bill of Jolene and I Will Always Love You.

Patreon tab: The Smashing Pumpkins – Tonight, Tonight

November 2021

In tabs: Red Hot Chili Peppers – I Could Have Lied Somewhere from West Side Story and Childish Gambino – Redbone.

Patreon tab: Cavatina from The Deer Hunter

December 2021

– My ukulele favourites of 2021.

In tabs: Cyndi Lauper – Time After Time, Bruce Springsteen – I’m On Fire and The Temptations – My Girl

Patreon tab: The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl – Fairytale of New York

January 2022

In tabs: Thank You for Being a Friend (Golden Girls Theme), The La’s – There She Goes and The Fray – How to Save a Life.

Patreon tab: Commodores – Easy

February 2022

Patreon tab: Pearl Jam – Jeremy

March 2022

In tabs: A very 90s month with Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit, Blind Melon – No Rain, Marcy Playground – Sex and Candy and some Britpop riffs.

Patreon tab: Nina Simone – I Put a Spell on You

April 2022

– Luthier, Rick Turner passed away.

In tabs: Foo Fighters – My Hero, David Bowie – The Man Who Sold the World and The Monkees – Daydream Believer.

Patreon tab: Toto- Africa

R.E.M. – Man on the Moon (Tab)

I tabbed R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion a while back. So high time I did a song from their follow-up Automatic for the People: Man on the Moon

Intro: Plenty of room to play around with ideas in the intro. I’m just picking out notes from a few chord inversions.

Verse: Just two chords (C and D), a stately pace and a contained melody.

Pre-Chorus: A classic pre-chorus, building up the energy into the chorus. So it starts at the same level as the verse, builds complexity and moves up the neck in bars 26 and 27. Then switches from picking to strumming in bar 28.

Chorus: The trickiest part of the song with chord changes coming thick and fast.

Solo: Another place you can introduce your own ideas. Mine is a similar idea to the intro with notes coming mostly from the chords. I’m also doing plenty of sliding around to emulate the slide guitar in the original.

This arrangement goes straight from the solo in the chorus. So I’ve taken a hint from the pre-chorus and ending the solo with a move up the neck and then some strumming.

Links

Buy the original
Losing My Religion tabs
Uke Hunt Patreon

Joe Hisaishi – Summer (Tab)

Joe Hisaishi is a prolific film composer (I only realised while researching this post that he scored a movie I watched while working on this piece). But he’s best known for his scores for the Studio Ghibli films and for Takeshi Kitano. Summer comes from one of Kitano’s gentler movies: Kikujiro.

This arrangement starts with some palm muted arpeggios before moving into the main melody. In this section, I’ve used the open g-string as a melody note in a number of places. You can replace any of these with E-string, 3rd fret if you prefer.

The arrangement goes full campanella mode in bar 18. Playing one note on each string means you don’t have to move your left hand at all for this quick section. Once you’ve got the picking pattern under your fingers it’s very easy.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the rising bass line here to fit with the higher pattern. So I’ve divided them up. So you play the pattern in G, then the lower bass part in bars 20-21, the high pattern in C in bars 22-23 and the bass pattern in C in bars 24-25.

After a reprise of the A section, the outro closes out with some notes up the neck. Which I manage to flub in bar 39. So play what’s written rather than my screw-up. I manage it second time around in bar 41 if you want to hear how it’s supposed to sound.

Links

Buy the original
More Movie Theme Tabs
Uke Hunt Patreon

Choan Gálvez – Brevity for Anita (Tab)

Today we have a guest post from Choan Gálvez with a piece from his latest book. Here are his notes:

‘Brevities‘ is a collection of short solo pieces for baritone ukulele aimed at the intermediate fingerpicker. In this set Choan Gálvez profits from the extended range, the sustain, and the resonance that this instrument and its tuning provide.

Styles go from renaissance inspiration to Brazilian choro, melancholic waltzes to exciting ragtime.

All the pieces are written for G6 linear tuning and presented in notation and tablature format. Don’t you own a baritone uke? Not an issue: everything is also playable on your low G instrument. Follow the tab!

‘Brevities‘ is available in print and digital editions from The Ukulele Bookshop.

Keane – Somewhere Only We Know (Tab)

Here’s my take on Keane’s mega-hit Somewhere Only We Know.

Intro: All down-strums here to give an authentic dad-rock feel.

Verse and Pre-Chorus: Switching to fingerpicking using a one-finger-per-string set up.

Chorus: Adding some strums here on the Em chord and picking more heavily than before. You can beef it up even further by strumming all the way through the final chorus but you’ll lose definition in the melody.

Solo: A quick and easy solo. It’s one I made up myself so you’re welcome to change it however you like.

Links

Buy the original
More 2000s tabs
Uke Hunt Patreon

Rick Turner, luthier and maker of the Compass Rose uke, has passed away. You can read fellow luthier Beau Hannam’s obituary for him here. And you can watch him playing some Django on one of his own ukes here.

– The Ukulele 2022 playlist is taking shape. With tracks from hip youngsters with a laissez faire attitude to capitalisation mxmtoon and BoyWithUke to classical pieces written by Philip Glass and Davide Tammaro.
– Jack White has taken to sharing the stage with a life-size sculpture of a guy playing the ukulele.

Window Shopping
– Kala Release their “April 1st Exclusives”
– Flight Aqua A10QM and Flight Pathfinder solid body electric.
– Southern Ukulele Store run down some very handsome Kanile’a ukes.
– Grateful Dead uke with an insane price tag.

Patreon

A massive thanks to all Uke Hunt’s Patreon backers for keeping the site up and running. And double thanks go to these legendary patrons of the arts:

– Arthur Foley
– Colleen Petticrew
– Dan
– Elizabeth Beardsley
– Fi Keane
– Jameson Gagnepain
– Jeff K
– Kelby Green
– Kie77
– Leia-lee Doran
– Lisa Johnson
– Monika Kolodziejczyk
– Moses Kamai
– Nevylle Carroll
– Nick Parsons
– Olga deSanctis
– Pat Weikle
– Pauline LeBlanc
– Robert
– T S
– Thorsten Neff

If you join Patreon at the Concert level or higher, you’ll get access to all previous exclusive tabs including April’s: Toto’s Africa.

View Ukulele Clubs and Groups in a larger map

For the last 12 years I’ve been keeping list and a map of all the ukulele clubs I’ve been told about. In that time, the list of UK groups has got unusably large. And, in a possibly related matter, I’ve been having technical problems with the page and have taken it down. So here’s a fresh post and from now on I’ll be updating just the map.

For anyone who has a use for it, here’s the list of clubs in the UK and Ireland as it stood:

Ukulele Clubs and Groups in the UK and Ireland

If you’d like your club added to the map please send the name of the group, the location and the url of website/Facebook/wherever on the net to ukulelehunt@gmail.com

The Monkees – Daydream Believer (Tab)

Daydream Believer by The Monkees is fairly straightforward to play. The biggest challenges are a few quick hops up the neck. The trickiest one coming in the shift between bars 8 and 9. Other than that, it’s all familiar chord shapes and a simple but insanely catchy melody.

The original is in the key of G and that fits very nicely on the uke so I’ve kept it for this arrangement. The little piano riff in the intro works particularly well.

Links

Buy the original
More 60s tabs and chords
Uke Hunt Patreon

Foo Fighters – My Hero (Tab)

In tribute to Taylor Hawkins: My Hero by Foo Fighters.

The song starts off with a bit of dissonance between the Ab on the E-string and the open A string. The Ab also provides dissonance as the first note in the chorus melody (bar 16).

My first arrangement contained strumming almost all the way through. So in the intro I was strumming the second half of bars 1 and 2. And also strumming in the gaps at the end of every other bar in the verse. If you want to do it that way, go for it. But I decided to create a bit more of a contrast been the sections by picking adding picking to the quieter sections.

For the “solo” section of the tab is more in keeping with the spirit of that section rather than the actual notes. It’s really just a breakdown cooling things off before bringing the rock back. So as long as you build up at the end, you’re free to do whatever you like with this section.

Links

Buy the original
Smells Like Teen Spirit tab
Uke Hunt Patreon

Watch on YouTube

Tracklist
Elisabeth Pfeiffer – Dance of the Mountain Sage
Ronya-Lee and the Light Factory – Light
BoyWithUke ft. blackbear – IDGAF
Gracie Terzian ft. Vinicius Vivas and Rotem Sivan – Waiting for a Train
4stringboy – Ain’t Nobody
Belinda Underwood – Thinkin’ Dirty
Del Rey – Sitting On Top of The World
CocoCapitainePoulet – Le Club de l’Apocalypse
Herman Vandecauter – Canario
Gerald Ross – How Sweet It Is