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.
Ever since Money Heist hit Netflix, I’ve had a steady stream of YouTube commenters telling me I look like Helsinki (played by Darko Peric. There were only two responses I could make to this: get a giant, angry bear tattooed on my body or do a cover of theme tune. So until the tattoo parlours reopen here’s a tab of the theme Cecilia Krull’s My Life Is Going On.
The first half of the arrangement is played with fingerpicking (thumb on C-string, index on E-string and middle on A-string). Then switches to strumming with a few picked notes in between. The wavy lines indicate roll strums (i.e. strumming with every finger on your strumming hand in quick succession).
Finishing off this bonus Patreon week with a request from Taras. A fitting request since this week sees the 30th anniversary of Twin Peaks.
Other than some thumb action in bars 27 and 28, I’m using one finger per string picking all the way through. And thanks to the slow pace, it’s mostly easy going.
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.
As well as being hilarious and insightful, it also uses some great music. Both in terms of licensed music and original music from Jesse Novak (who I’ve covered before with his People Person’s Paper People jingle from The Office). So I had to put together a medley of my favourite songs from the show (that RBW pretended to like proving himself to be a Hollywoob phoney).
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
Buy the BoJack Horseman soundtrack
More TV theme
Uke Hunt on Patreon
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.
