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.
Tag: Moderate
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Garbage – Only Happy When It Rains (Tabs)
I’m back and I’m starting the year how I intend to carry on: with pessimistic miserablism in the form of Garbage’s Only Happy When It Rains.
Verse: Not wasting any time with an intro. Since the melody does a lot of switching between A and G, I’m taking advantage of the re-entrant string and using the open A and G notes. I love how well the bent notes at the fifth fret work here.
Chorus: Switching to a major key for a fairly jaunty chorus melody.
Solo: Nothing too flashy here. If you do want to get flashy, you could replace some of the notes at the third fret at the start of the bars in the second half with notes bent at the second fret. That’s more true to the original but tricky to pull off (particularly on the E chord).
Outro: A bit of stretch here when you’re playing Am then hitting the A-string, 5th fret.
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Slade – Merry Xmas Everybody (Tabs)
Intro: Starting off in usual fashion with Eb leading into G major. The Bb note (A-string, 1st fret) suggests G minor so the G major chord is a little surprising.
Verse: I’m fingerpicking this section the first two times it’s played. The third I’m using some strumming particularly on the Gsus4-G bit. You can do that every time if you prefer.
Chorus: The Eb chord crops up again creating discord under the line, “Everybody’s having fun,” and suggesting the Christmas isn’t as merry as claimed. If that was intentional, Noddy Holder is a more nuanced songwriter than I gave him credit for.
Bridge: I had forgotten this section existed. But it does give us the Gm that has been hinted at since the intro.
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R.E.M. – Endgame (Tabs)
An instrumental track from R.E.M.’s classic Out of Time.
Intro: Starting off with thumb and two finger picking.
I love the way this riff works with open strings on the uke. So much so, I considered inserting into the song itself. In the end, I saved it for the outro.
Verse: By far the hardest part of the song comes with the big jumps down the fretboard in bars 13-16. Well worth practicing these bars by themselves until you’ve got them down.
Chorus: Switching to one finger per string picking and moving into strums at the end of the chorus.
Bridge: This section is just chord strumming.
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The Jesus and Mary Chain – Sometimes Always (Tabs)
Tabbing a Mazzy Star song inspired to me to bash together this Hope Sandoval featuring Jesus and Mary Chain song. And “bash” is an accurate description. It’s a route 1 arrangement with just strumming and melody.
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The Smashing Pumpkins – 1979 (Tabs)
1979 is the Smumpkins’s biggest hit but was almost cut from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Which is confusing as that album could do with a dozen songs cutting but not this one.
This arrangement is mercifully easy after the nightmare of Send Me on My Way. This one is all strumming and nothing too difficult with the fretting hand. So you can really concentrate on mixing up the dynamics and enjoying the chill Gmaj7 chords.
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Alanis Morissette – Hand in My Pocket (Tabs)
The intro and verses are very straightforward. It’s one chord all the way through and you don’t have to move up the neck.
But things get much trickier in the transition into the chorus. There’s more movement up and down the neck and some of the twiddles are a challenge. Bar 16 is the section I had to practice the most.
The harmonica solo is very simple. There’s lots of room for being more ambitious here (particularly with the chords just being a C drone) but I like the simplicity of the original.
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Neil Diamond – Song Sung Blue (Tabs)
The chill organ intro is my favourite part of the song. I’m picking this using one-finger-per-string.
The picking in the verse is a bit more haphazard. But the basis is the thumb alternating between the g- and C-strings with each followed by a strum. Then the melody sits of top of that.
In the original, there’s a half-verse solo with an instrumental of the melody. Since we’re already doing that, I threw in a quick solo of my own making. Plenty of scope for your own ideas here.
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The White Stripes – We’re Going to Be Friends (Tabs)
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:
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Keane – Somewhere Only We Know (Tabs)
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.
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