As promised when I tabbed bury a friend, here’s a version of the slightly less creepy and more Bon Iver-y when the party’s over.
The song is mainly made up of vocal harmonies which means it works well with ukulele chords. There is a lot of space in the tune. So make sure you let it breathe and don’t take it too fast.
I first stumbled across Billie Eilish with her ukulele song party favor. I enjoyed it enough to stick it on my Ukulele 2017 Spotify playlist but wasn’t entirely blown away. Something must have happened since then because she’s released four outstandingly good songs in a row.
The song is split between melodic sections like the People are Strange-like intro and the “Debt I owe…” section and the more mood-based sections. To emphasise that I’m playing the melodic sections using fingerpicking and the moody sections with strums (including plenty of muting for strings that aren’t being played).
Thunder has many elements that make it great for a uke adaption: a strong melody, Simple chords in the key of C and some fun solo parts. But it also has that damn squeaky-voice section. That section was the hardest to get right and I’m still not sure it entirely works. There’s a note at the 15th fret in that part. If your uke doesn’t go that high you can replace it with the A-string, 10th fret to get a similar effect.
The piece starts out using thumb and two finger picking for the verse and pre-chorus. Then in switches to mostly strumming to blast out the chorus and then uses a combination of strums, picking and flicks (flicking the index finger upwards to hit the A, E and sometimes C strings).
This Frank Loesser song was originally recorded by The Orioles but has become a bit of a ukulele classic since being covered by Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon Levitt in 2011. I wrote up the chords back then and now time for a tab.
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It’s impossible to get away from this song around this time. And this blog isn’t going to give you any respite. But it has been 10 years since I posted the chords so it’s about time for the tabs.
This arrangement starts off with pretty simple with a loose fingerpicking arrangement. After that it’s strummed with a few notes picked and a lot of string muting until a return to fingerpicking right at the end.
In case you’re not familiar with the repeat markings, You play straight through to “D.S. al Coda” the first time. Then you go back to the symbol that looks like a drunk dollar sign in bar 23. Play up to where it says “Da Coda” then skip ahead to the target in bar 59.
Technically, I shouldn’t be posting this on White Album week. But it was recorded during the White Album sessions and it is one of the best (possibly the best) Beatles song. If you’re dying for a White Album song have a go at the Blackbird tab.
I’ve kept the arrangement as simple as possible. It has such a strong (and well known) melody it doesn’t need much to back it up. I’m not following any strict pattern for the fingerpicking. For the most part the thumb plays the lowest string in the bar then letting the fingers fall on a string each from there.
In the repeat of the chorus I play a slight variation on the, “And don’t you knowwwwww…” in bars 15 and 16.
After all that I switch to strumming and the occasional finger flick for the boisterous sh-outro. I bash out a couple of adornments in this section. You don’t need to do anything complicated with these so long as you use the appropriate amount of gusto. Both mine are just based on the C7 chord.
For Halloween, a song from the greatest horror film ever made. It’s so densely packed with detail, unforgettable images and jarring juxtapositions. Which has spawned an entire industry of fan theories from the undeniable to the entirely ridiculous to the disturbing and plausible (and if that theory is true it recontextualizes this song in an entirely alarming way).
Midnight, the Stars and You was originally perfromed by Al Bowlly and Ray Noble and released in 1934. Making it out of time for the 1921 photo. The song also cropped up in Snowpiercer and was recently unexpectedly covered by Deerhoof.
The tune gives plenty of room for some jazzy noodling. For the first half of the arrangement I use those gaps to play around with the chords. In bars 7-8 and 11-12 I add in chromatic descending notes. And in bars 19-20 I throw in diminished and augmented chords.
In the second half of the verse I throw in a couple of licks in bars 23 and 27-28. In those licks I’m using the F Mixolydian scale. Which sounds fancy but is just an F major scale with a flatted 7th (i.e. an Eb instead of an E). I picked that up from the Eb used so effectively in the descending run at the end of the original version.
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