The Pinky and the Brain theme is a lot of fun to play. I always love a bit of strum blocking on the riff, i.e. strumming all the strings and muting all but one. It gives the tune a forceful, percussive sound that you can’t get from just picking.
Tag: 2000s
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Sleater Kinney – Modern Girl (Tabs)
Sleater Kinney’s Modern Girl has a straightforwardness and sarcastic cheeriness that makes this one their most uke-able songs.
Intro: The intro is a very simple bit of fingerpicking. It’s a good piece to try if you’re new to fingericking. The thumb picks everything on the C- and E-strings. And the middle finger picks the A-string. Then the index finger picks the E-string in bar 5 and from bar 10 onwards.
Verse: The picking gets trickier in this section. I’m mostly using one finger per string picking. But I play the rapid notes in bar 22 with alternate picking.
Chorus: A lot more strums in this section. But some more quick alternate picking in bar 26.
Solo: The harmonic solo is my favourite part of the song. And it’s pretty simple to play. The tricky part is the quick transition into the next verse.
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Weezer – Island in the Sun (Tabs)
In a shocking turn of events, it’s raining in England. So here’s Island in the Sun for some sunny vibes.
Intro: Just strumming out the chords. Be sure to make the “hip hip” bits stand out.
Verse and Chorus: Other than a slide up to the fifth fret in bars 5 and 9, this is all stays in the first position. It does get a little fiddly in places.
Bridge: Very straightforward. You can just bash this section out.
Solo: The solo in the original just follows the verse melody. For my version, I’ve beefed up the melody with a few harmonies. You could just play this section like the verses. Or you could go your own way entirely.
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The Flaming Lips – Do You Realize?? (Tabs)
There’s nothing too difficult to play in Do You Realize?? . But it is constantly shifting. There are slight changes in chord progressions, melodies and time signatures. Not much is a direct repeat. I found keeping track of everything a bit taxing on the noggin.
Intro: I’ve tabbed the emphasised strums (the little arrows above the tab) for the first two bars. But the same pattern continues.
Verse: This is a good example of what I was talking about. It feels like the chord progression should repeat in the first verse. But it’s slightly different every time. Although the two verse fragments later in the song are direct repeats.
Chorus: Two entirely different choruses. The first has a lot of strums and is in G. The second is more delicate and is in Em.
Break: A brief key change to Bb before heading back to G.
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Aphex Twin – Avril 14th (Tabs)
If I’m going to tab an Aphex Twin song, there’s only one choice: Avril 14th. Which was interpolated by Kanye West on Blame Game.
A Section: By far the hardest part of the song is the artificial harmonics that start in bar 5. In these bits, I’m picking the C-string with my thumb and playing artificial harmonics on the other strings.
Take a look at 4stringboy if you want to see artificial harmonics done right. If you’re as bad at them as me, you can just skip the harmonics part and play the standard and it’ll sound fine.
B Section: AKA the section that goes on twice as long as it should. Just a jump up to the 7th fret to deal with here.
C Section: The easiest section of the song. A bit of campanella picking while holding down a single chord shape.
D Section: This is the oddest section of the piece. It’s simplified from the original. But it bounces all over the fretboard.
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Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros – Home (Tabs)
Intro: Straight in with the trickiest part of the song. If you wanted to make this easier, you could just chug out the chords rather than tackling the fingerpicking.
Verse: I’ve tried to keep the feeling of a duet in this section. For the female part, I use bends and play close to the bridge to give it a raspier sound. Then play away from the bridge to get a fuller tone for the male part. You can judge for yourself whether it works. I’m not sure.
If you don’t want to play the bends, you can replace them with the open A-string.
Chorus: Nice and easy. Just picking a simple melody and strumming the chords.
Solo: Nothing difficult here either in terms of fretting. But there are a bunch of bars of 2/4 which make the timing tricky to keep track of.
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Eddie Vedder – Rise (Tabs)
Possibly because of Eddie Vedder’s affection for the uke, the mandolin song from the Into the Wild soundtrack, Rise fits nicely on the uke without changing the key.
After a fingerpicking intro, the song is almost all strums. With just a few notes picked out. The verses and choruses are straightforward. It’s just the solo and that outro that have a few stretches and jumps up and down the neck.
I’ve kept the solo and the outro fairly faithful to the original, but there’s plenty of space in those to throw in your own ideas.
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Arctic Monkeys – Fluorescent Adolescent (Tabs)
After tabbing Do I Wanna Know? in January, I hope it’s not too soon to cover another Monkeys track: Fluorescent Adolescent
The biggest challenge here (after spelling the title) is the very rapid delivery of the verse melody. These bits are played with a long succession of hammer-ons and pull-offs. Make sure you pull-off downwards rather than straight off the string. That’ll give it an extra pluck to keep the notes sounding.
Other than that, it’s a fun song to blast through.
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Green Day – Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Tabs)
Intro: The verse of Boulevard uses the same chords as the verse of Wonderwall so I went extra Wonderwally for the intro.
Verses: Nothing too tricky here. Just fingerpicking around first position chords.
Chorus: Switching to strums and moving up and down the neck much more.
Solo: This is where it gets challenging. It’s a series of chord stabs with octaves between them. The upside is that it’s very repetitive, so there’s not a lot of it to tackle.
Outro: A completely new chord sequence here using chromatic moves. It’s just bashed out with strums.
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KT Tunstall – Black Horse & the Cherry Tree (Tabs)
This is a very propulsive song even in the very sparse sections. So in the verses, where it’s just the melody line, I’m using strum blocking to keep the energy up. The verse melody is busy. But it’s fine to miss a couple of notes so long as you keep the song moving along.
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