Shamefully, I’ve never seen an episode of Buffy. I couldn’t even have hummed the theme tune before it was requested on the Patreon. Even so, it’s such a 90s-fest it gave me nostalgia.
And it’s dead simple. It’s mostly bashing out chords with a few single notes here and there.
I hope you brought a change of clothes because your eyes are about to piss tears thanks to Andy Dwyer’s heartbreaking tribute to Li’l Sebastian.
The trickiest part of playing this is fighting through the tears. There are also some quick bits of picking and a rogue bar of 2/4 on “horsiest friend” near the end.
If you want to play along with the original, put a capo on the second fret.
A short and sweet one I worked out while watching the New Zealand version of Taskmaster.
The theme is mostly just chords with a few notes picked out. The tricky bit comes right at the end (bars 8-9) that goes way up the fretboard. You can safely chop it short and end the run at the first 12th fret.
After that, I’ve added in the little theme that plays at the start of the tasks.
This one is a lot of fun but a real finger-twister. I slowed it down a fair amount from the original and it’s still a challenge with quick runs, big leaps up the fretboard and a couple of triplet strums.
There are also some very strange musical choices in it. Most notable is the key change from E minor to F major (in my version) in bar 13. Up to that point, the only two notes that haven’t appeared are F and C (both of which show up in the F chord).
You might might not recognise the name of this but the tune is best known to Brits my age as the Vision On/Take Hart gallery theme. And to less grey people might recognise it as the theme to the intro level of LittleBigPlanet.
This arrangement is heavily focussed on the jaunty melody with just a few chord stabs thrown in to keep things bouncing along. That means it’s fairly easy to play once you’ve got the fingering sorted out. The only tricky bits are the quick runs up the neck in bars 13 and 28.
A short and sweet one: the theme to the TV show Community a.k.a. At Least It Was Here by The 88. It’s a jaunty little tune that transfers very nicely to uke. The highlight here is the rising chord move of C5-C6-C7 that builds the tension perfectly into the second half of the tune.