I used to only know this tune as, “that chicken song from the cartoons,” until I found out it had an actual name. Chicken Reel was written in 1910 by Joseph Daly but was adopted and adapted into the bluegrass catalogue.
And I’ve gone with a very bluegrass inspired version played fast and loose. I use thumb and two finger picking all the way through. Plus, I make liberal use of campanella which means I long parts of the A section are played just on open strings. Leaving your fretting-hand to play Candy Crush, fill out your taxes or tear an apple in half.
The C section is based on a part many bluegrass players include that I love. It really doubles down on the chicken theme by including a clucking sound.
After bouncing off BoJack a couple of times, I finally started watching it in earnest after I was told to watch this fantastic bit with K Flay’s Blood in the Cut riff. After that it rapidly became one of my favourite shows of all time.
For most of the medley I’m either using strums (with a few picked notes mingled in) or thumb and two finger picking.
The song that works best on ukulele is the outstanding I Will Always Think of You. Which is such a dead-on pastiche I had to double check it wasn’t a long lost Cole Porter song.
The trickiest to pull off is Back in the 90s. That includes some quick Cotton picking i.e. the thumb alternates between the g- and C-strings with the index and middle fingers playing the melody on the E- and A-strings respectively.
The full tracklist:
A Horse with No Name (America)/Special Feeling/Avant Gardener (Courtney Barnett)/I Just Met My Perfect Match/Generic 90s Grunge Song/Mr Peanutbutter’s House/Blood in the Cut (K.Flay)/I Will Always Think of You/Back in the 90s/Stars (Nina Simone)/Boxer vs. Raptor
Following up on Brave Sir Robin with another medieval pastiche. This time from the TV show The Witcher. I haven’t got around to watching the show yet, but Toss a Coin to Your Witcher has been impossible to avoid.
The original is in Am so it transfers neatly to the ukulele in the original key. There’s nothing massively difficult in the tune. But the hardest parts are the jumps up the neck. Particularly the one in bar 16. So I’ve arranged it with open strings in the previous two notes so you move up the neck early in preparation.
I don’t think any ukulele player has had a bigger year than Billie Eilish. She’s been all over the shop and her debut album WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? and 2017 EP don’t smile at me have both been selling by the bucket-hat load. I’ve already done a few tracks from the album, so today I’m doing one from the EP.
I’m using one finger per string picking all the way through this arrangement. There are many chnks in the song which can make it difficult to get your fingers back in position. I’d recommend not doing a standard chnk and instead muting the strings with your fretting hand and bringing each finger down on the string it’s plucking. That should leave them in the right position for picking.
The tab is pretty long thanks to the second verse and second chorus being slightly different to the first. Both are a little trickier second time around. I don’t think anyone would notice if you just played them the same both times.
Over the last 35 years They Might Be Giants have but out some of the funnest and nerdiest music around (and found some time to paint cat ukuleles). So I collected together some of their best known songs along with some of my favourites.
Istanbul (Not Constantinople): Starts off with a short solo using the F harmonic minor scale. Which is like the more common F natural minor scale but with the Eb replaced by an E (A-string, 7th fret). The melody for the chorus is made up solely of notes in the Fm chord then the C7 chord. So hold down these notes as long as possible to build the chords behind the melody.
Birdhouse in Your Soul: I wrote up tab for the entire song here. This is just the intro transposed to the key of F.
Dr Worm: A quick version of Rabbi Vole’s guitar solo.
Boss of Me: AKA the Malcolm in the Middle theme. The chorus for this part is dead simple. It’s mostly just switching between the open A-string and A-string, 3rd fret while the chords change underneath.
Older: While the rest of the songs after Istanbul are in F, this one is in its equivalent minor: D minor.
Dog on Fire: AKA The Daily Show theme. From the original version before Timberland chopped it up.
Seven Days of the Week: From their third album of children’s songs Here Come the 1,2,3s. Although there only seems to be the most marginal difference between their children’s records and the rest of their oeuvre.
Finishing off cartoon week with an exceptionally catchy tune that set the standard for yelling “woo hoo!”. And it’s particularly relevant to give it a ukeing now that the rejiggered series features Uke Hunt favourite Kate Micucci.
The song includes a subtle key change with the chorus being a whole step higher the second time around. To keep things easy to memorise, I’ve arranged it so it’s played exactly the same but two frets higher second time around.
There’s a long history of murder ballads in folk music. But they’re all set comfortably in the past. It’s a very different experience listening to a song about murders set in your own lifetime.
The Shankill Butchers were loyalist gang in 1970s Northern Ireland who viciously murdered 19 people (possibly with police turning a blind eye). Hearing a song mythologising them is an uncomfortable experience. But it brings home how fresh the events in old murder ballads were to those who originated them.
Shankill Butchers is in the key of C#m. My first instinct was to rearrange it into a more uke-friendly key like Cm or Dm. But it turned out to work best in C#m. The intro riff (played with the thumb alternating between picking the g- and C-strings) works particularly well.
Dick Gaughan’s Handful of Earth is an absolute powerhouse folk album. One of the best records of the 80s. Probably the best that didn’t come out of Manchester (okay, maybe Minnesota too). The highlight of the album is his galvanising take on Leon Rosselson’s The World Turned Upside Down
I tried to capture the force and relentlessness of Gaughan’s version in my arrangement. I’ve done that by having my thumb hammering out eighth notes on the g-string the whole way through.
Then on top of that you have the middle finger and the ring finger picking the melody on the E and C-strings respectively.
One of the many areas the BBC excels in is the exceptionally nerdy quiz show. I can’t imagine anyone else coming up with museum based quiz or a show like Only Connect where questions are chosen via Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Connecting Only Connect to ukuleles is very easy. Season three winner Jenny Ryan (who went on to become The Vixen on The Chase) is a keen uker with the excellently named Nanukes of the North.