Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black has to be one of the best albums of the noughties. I tabbed Rehab a while back. And it’s high time I tackled the title track.
The chord progression is Gm – Cm – Eb – D in the verse and chorus. That drop down from Eb to D is so effective in conveying a sense of defeat.
The verse melody acts in a similar way starting out on just a single note repeated (G in this arrangement) and ending by dropping down one fret on the D chord.
Wheatus’s Teenage Dirtbag has become a bit of a uke favourite with the UOGB’s version. I haven’t entirely decided if it’s an irresistible earworm or an irritating song with terrible lyrics. But I did have fun playing it.
Intro: Muted strums on the g and C-strings, then extra emphasis on the E and A-strings.
Verse: One finger per string picking with a few supporting strums where there’s no melody.
Chorus: The first chorus is full on strumming. It finishes off with a bar of 2/4 then a little riff (that’s my favourite part of the song).
The second chorus in this arrangement (the third in the original) has constant thumb picking on the C-string while the melody notes are picked on the E and A.
Bridge: A bit of stretch up to the seventh fret here. But the big challenge is the “She doesn’t know…” bit which first crops up in bar 27. It gets pretty fiddly in the cramped higher frets.
The Magnetic Fields were one of the bands that got me to take the ukulele seriously. So it’s long past time I did a version of The Book of Love. It seems that (thanks to its use in the finale of Scrubs) Peter Gabriel’s version is the best known. But, on this occasion, the original remains my favourite.
This arrangement uses a few elements of the Gabriel version (including the slower tempo and a few bits of filigree) but mostly sticks to the original.
It’s a very simple song with the same chords the whole way through: G – C – D11 – G. D11 is just a standard D chord with the g-string left open.
The intro and solo are just me noodling around with the melody and chords. With the intro in the first position and the solo higher up the neck. Lots of scope for your own take on these.
I’m using one finger per string picking for this up to the last bar of the solo. There I switch to strums for the final chorus.
Afroman’s Because I Got High is a very simple song. Three chords and just a verse with a bit of variation in the intro and a bit of getting jiggy with it in the outro.
The only tricksy thing going on (other than a bunch of percussive chnks) is the campanella picking on “Coz I got high…” which first shows up in bars 6-7. I think having the notes ring into each recreates the slurred, stumbling feel of the original.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist, Nick Zinner is one of my favourite guitar players. His playing is very minimal but he makes every note count. Never more so than on Maps. This arrangement is minimal too. With a few nods to the acoustic version which is a bit more fleshed out with the chords.
Here’s my take on Dido’s very catchy but slightly annoying Thank You. Famously sampled in Eminem’s Stan.
Intro: A nice little chord arpeggio section using one finger per string picking.
Verse: From this point on, the picking is all over the place. There are a few tricky sections here. I found bars 7 and 8 required the most practice.
Chorus: Things chill out a bit in the chorus. There’s a big slide up to the 8th fret to deal with. And some alternate picking required for the fast notes at the end of bars 12 and 16.
Bridge: A slight variation on the verse with the Am-Gm ending from the chorus.
Following on from These Days with another Cotten-picking arrangement: a rare White Stripes acoustic song We’re Going to Be Friends. But this is easier than These Days as the thumb alternating between the g- and C-strings through the whole song.
The melody is very simple and repetitive almost like a nursery rhyme. But there are slight variations between the verses that you need to include to create at least a little variety.
The only big variation comes in the bridge section where they go far out and include a fourth chord. But you’re still picking the same basic patterns.
For a quick bonus, here’s another ditty Conan uses on his podcast arranged for low-G uke:
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.
The chorus for this one is insanely catchy. And the benefit of playing an instrumental version is that you don’t have to wonder why he rhymes a word with itself so many times in this song.
This one is fingerpicked all the way through. I’m using one-finger-per-string picking all the way through. But you can switch to alternate picking for some of the rapid notes.
The chorus is nice and straight-forward and the solo is very basic. The only part I had trouble with was the verses. The melody shifts slightly all the time. Which made it hard for me to keep track of. But it is nice and compact and doesn’t require anything fancy.
Warren Zevon’s Keep Me in Your Heart is one of the emotional songs I know of. It was the final track on his final album The Wind released shortly before his death. It was used recently by Jimmy Carr to pay tribute to Sean Lock.
It’s a straight-forward one to play. Nothing too tricky and one finger per string picking all the way through.