I couldn’t let the festive season pass without another addition to my jazz odyssey. This time the Christmas classic written by Joan Javits and Philip Springer in 1953 and made popular by Eartha Kitt.
I used the intro and turnarounds to stretch out a bit and throw in some fancy chords and chromatic notes. I would definitely recommend playing around and coming up with your own ideas for those sections.
The fingerpicking is all over the place. So do whatever feels natural to you.
If you’re interested in more Christmas tabs, check out my Christmas ebooks.
Fats Domino’s version of Blueberry Hill perfectly shows off the roots of rock and roll. He plays the driving boogie-woogie and has blues riff bassline. But the song itself is a country song first released by Gene Autry. So you have this sweet, major key country melody rubbing up against bluesy runs and liberal use of the minor third (the C-string, 3rd fret in my tab).
I’ve tried to keep those two elements in my arrangement of the tune. The verses have the melody with the bassline sitting between the lines (now not at all bassy). Try to separate these by playing the melody a bit louder (I didn’t do a great job of this in the video). The, “Wind in the willow…” section lays off the bassline and has chord stabs in between the melody. Keep those short by releasing the pressure with your fretting hand just after you strum.
To finish the song off I’ve added a little blues run. A great place to throw in your own favourite blues licks and play around.
Continuing this week’s Kitty Lux tributes with a live UOGB favourite: The Dam Busters March by Eric Coates. This isn’t a direct tab of their version but is heavily influenced by it.
I’ve divided up the duties in the piece so that each ukulele part has a different skill level. If you’ve got more players in your group you can divide these up further or devise your own complementary parts.
A load of tricky sections in this part (yet somehow it was the easy section at the end I managed to screw up in the video). The hardest section are the rapid-fire notes and moves up and down the neck in bars 40-44. But all the way through the first half there are bits that might trip you up. Luckily, things are much more stately in the second half.
I’m using fingerpicking to play this part. But it’s arranged in more of a UOGB than my usual style so it’s easier to play with a pick.
If, like me, you have no friends here’s a backing track to play this part along with:
The baritone tone is a little easier than the lead part. It’s mainly a simplified version of the lead part played an octave lower. The biggest challenges are the descending runs in bars 13 – 16 and bars 40-44.
Again, I’m playing this with my fingers but it’s arranged so it’s easy to play with a pick too.
I’ve kept this part as simple as possible. It’s all played with down-strums and it’s almost all beginner level chords.
There are a couple of slightly unusual sections where I’m just playing the top three strings. I’m playing these by strumming down with my thumb to give them a softer, rounder sound. But you don’t have to do that. And if you want to play all the strings it happens to be the second fret on the g-string that’s missing in every case.
The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Take Five (written by the group’s saxophonist Paul Desmond) is an absolute instrumental classic. That’s why I started working on it in the early days of Uke Hunt (the 27th February 2008 according to the date on the file). Since then it’s been occasionally dragged out of the pile of half finished tabs but I haven’t had a version I was happy with until now. I hope it was worth the wait!
The song takes its name from its 5/4 time signature (i.e. there are five beats in a bar rather than the more common 3 or 4). You probably haven’t played in 5/4 time before but it’s not that hard to get the hang of. I find counting out the bars 1, 2, 3, 1, 2 gives you a good feel for the groove of the piece and you can drop the counting once you’re in the swing of it.
Here’s another tune from Breaking Bad. This time an instrumental version of Marty Robbins’ El Paso from Felina.
This piece – while not really bad – is a challenge. I’ve slowed it down slightly from the original version to make it more playable.
There’s a bit of a mishmash of picking techniques. Mostly it’s one finger per string with some supporting strums. But I switch to thumb and two fingers in the sections where the g-string isn’t played.
The other technique I use is the roll strum. I use that in bar 9.
The Trickiest Bit
The run in the bar three is very difficult. The first part is played campanella style. That gives you two open strings during which you can move from the first position up so your middle finger is playing the note at the sixth fret.