If you’ve been following my riffs for ukulele series, you’ll have heard me encourage you to use it more creatively than just playing one riff at a time. One way to use them is to cram a bunch of them together to make a melody. That’s what I did with my Arctic Monkeys medley and this collection of Strokes riffs.
The songs in this medley are:
Barely Legal/Take It Or Leave It/Hard to Explain/12:51/One Way Trigger/Reptilia/Barely Legal (again)/Someday/Under Cover of Darkness/Last Nite
The xx were the highlight of my sofa-Glastonbury this year. It might have been Arctic Monkeys if it weren’t for that weird gameshow host thing and the cheesy, Oasis-style string arrangements. For a better example of arranging for pop bands have a listen to Alex Baranowski’s work with The xx.
Anyway, their performance inspired me to have a go at this instrumental piece. I first tried it on standard uke but it didn’t work out. I moved on to low-G with was better. Then I went insane and decided to drag my aNueNue harp ukulele out of deep storage.
The harp strings on the uke are supposed to be tuned C, D, E, F. But I retuned the bottom two to A. One to pluck and the other to give a bit of sympathetic resonance. The sympathetic resonance turned out quite well. You can particularly hear the reverb-like effect at the beginning.
Important: The letters above the tab represent the bass note being played in that bar they’re not the chords.
The strings tabbed are just tuned like a normal low-G. And it’s tabbed in the same key as the original. So if you’re playing a low-G you can just play this tab along with the record or a bass-playing friend.
To play it with a high-g ukulele you’ll need to move the whole thing up an octave. Here’s a tab for that. This time with the chord names above the tab.
Nype suggested I do a uke version of Eddie Vedder’s Tuolumne from the soundtrack of Into the Wild (and the precursor to Just Breathe). I was a bit trepedacious as a lot of guitar picking songs end up finger-crunchingly tricky on ukulele. But it actually works out very well. I didn’t even have to change the key.
Moving down from the 10th fret at the end of bar 2 to the 3rd fret. If you have trouble with that you can take off that 10th fret and just play bar 2 like bar 3.
The right hand is doing a constant Travis-picking pattern. The thumb alternates between the g and C-strings, the index finger picks the E-string and the middle finger picks the A-string.
I think this tune has to be the most overused piece of music on television: reality shows, sporting montages, documentaries. And now it’s been covered by the guy off of G4. That would usually be enough to kill off any song. But this song is so magnificent it gives me goosebumps every time I hear it.
For the uke arrangement I’ve moved everything up a fret from the original to the more uke-friendly key of C. The first half of tune is all played campanella style (i.e. one note per string letting them ring into each other). I know a lot of people don’t like this way of playing but, screw it, it’s easily the best way of arranging a tune like this.
The most important thing to get right is the dynamics (quiet and louds bits). The original gets this one spot on. Obviously you’re not going to have the same dynamic range as a full band and a string section. But try to let the music swell in the first half and blossom in the second half. The dynamics are what gives emotion to the tune.
Another important thing to get right – which I completely failed to do in the video – is to keep an even tempo. I speed up much too fast towards the end. So do as I say not as I do.
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