The Quizeum is BBC4’s traveling museum panel show and my new favourite quiz. How could you not love a high-brow quiz show not afraid to use the phrase, “You’ve got a face full of dicks”?
It also has a pleasant, bouncy theme tune that works well on uke.
Teardrop is one of my all time favourite songs. As well as the original Massive Attack version (used as the theme tune to House) there have been a bunch of great covers. The version by Jose Gonzalez and Acoustic Labs’ instrumental guitar take on it had a big influence on my version.
There are a couple of unconventional techniques in this arrangement. The first is in the percussive section (bars 13-14). Here I’m using muted strums the rapping my finger nails against the bottom edge of the uke. In the tab the muted strums are an x on the C-string and the nail-strums are an x on the A-string.
I tried out a few different percussive techniques (e.g. bashing the body of the uke with the side of my hand in place of the muted strums and tapping my fingernails on the sides of the uke) and some are very effective. I settled on these because they’re the most straightforward but I’d recommend trying out a few variations for yourself.
The trickiest parts are the harmonics in bars 27-30. Harmonics at the fifth fret give the high ringing required but they’re a real pain to play. I screw up a few of them in my version. If you want something more forgiving play the harmonics at the twelfth fret. They’ll sound right but be an octaves lower.
Buy the Massive Attack version on iTunes
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Learn to play harmonics.
I had assumed Junior Brown’s Better Call Saul would be the theme tune to the show. But they went with the more unexpected choice of, Nottingham indie rockers, Little Barrie.
But the theme is very in keeping with the feel of the Breaking Bad theme. It’s similarly sparse which makes it a bit tricky to keep time. As you can see in the video, I keep strumming without touching the strings to keep time. But you can do it by tapping your foot or nodding your head.
LittleBarrie.com
Better Call Saul on iTunes
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Here’s one if you’re looking for a challenge. There are lots of jumps around the neck, syncopated rhythms, twists and turns, and tricky strum blocking to get to grips with.
On part that isn’t too difficult is the strumming hand. Most of the song my right hand is just strumming sixteenth notes. The rhythm is created by muting and playing strings with the left hand.
For example, in the intro you play a constant strum, hold down the chord stabs and mute the g-string (I use the thumb of my fretting hand), otherwise mute all the strings.
Here’s a video of it done slowly then up to speed:
The verse is done in a similar way. Strum constant sixteenth notes and mute the strings when nothing is played. The difference is you also have to mute all but one string. That can get tricky and it takes a lot of practice. I call this strum blocking and I did a tutorial on it here. It’s a great way to give a piece lots of attack and a strong rhythm.
In this song I mostly mute the g-string with my thumb, C-string with my middle finger, E-string with my ring finger and the A-string with the underside of my index finger. But you’ll need to play around with it and see what works best for you.
Here’s the first line of the first verse played slowly then up to speed:
Note: in the tab I’ve noted the muted strums with just one x to keep the tab clean. But you do strum all the strings.
Other note: In the video I mess up the ‘Saturday night…’ bit in the middle section. It should sound the same as it does in the bridge sections.
Way back in 2007 the second ever chord post I did was Despair in the Departure Lounge. Since then there’s been a steady stream of request for more Monkeys which I’d always replied to with, “I’ll do another Monkeys tab when they go back to making good records.” Johnny called me out on that promise correctly pointing out that the new album is awesome.
So here’s a medley of most of the songs on the album:
One for the Road/Do I Wanna Know?/Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?/Arabella/Knee Socks/I Want It All/R U Mine?
The trickiest bits for the fretting are the two big leaps on the fretboard. There’s the big slide up in R U Mine? where it isn’t such a big deal if you don’t hit it exactly. The really hard one is the 8th fret in bar 5. Cut that 1st fret note before it really short to give yourself some time to get up.
The trickiest bits for the strumming hand are the palm muting (i.e. lightly resting the underside of your hand on the string at the bridge to muffle the strings). In One for the Road and Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High? I’m muting all the strings. In Do I Wanna Know? I’m trying my best to mute the C-string while letting the E- and A-strings ring. As you can hear in the video I don’t always pull it off. It’s hard to get right so there’s nothing wrong with playing this section without any muting at all.
I just love Zeppelin so this song has been on my to-do pile for a long time. It had stayed there because I was a bit intimidated by how much there is going on. But once I got stuck into it the tune transferred to the ukulele surprisingly smoothly. I didn’t even have to change the key and I think I crammed the most important parts in.
My version is shortened but most of the important sections are in there once.
My favourite technique in the tune is the long, drawn out up strums. I’m doing a slow up strum with my index finger there. Definitely worth incorporating into your playing arsenal.
I found sliding down the 3323 chord really tricky. You can simplify out without losing anything much by muting the g-string and just sliding down the G7 chord shape i.e. from x323 to x212.
Here’s my take on Murray Gold’s I Am The Doctor. The theme for Matt Smith’s Doctor.
I also jammed a reference to the main Doctor Who Theme in at the end.
The main theme is in rather tricky 7/8 time. When counting it I went with “1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4″. But once I’d got the hang of playing it I dropped the count and just went with the swing of it.
The high, screechy violin bit in bars 5-8. You can simplify this a couple of ways. You can drop the note on the A-string 8th fret at the end of the bar and just stick with the 10th fret. Or you could play a simpler version without the screeches. Either repeat the first four bars or play bars 17-20.
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The xx were the highlight of my sofa-Glastonbury this year. It might have been Arctic Monkeys if it weren’t for that weird gameshow host thing and the cheesy, Oasis-style string arrangements. For a better example of arranging for pop bands have a listen to Alex Baranowski’s work with The xx.
Anyway, their performance inspired me to have a go at this instrumental piece. I first tried it on standard uke but it didn’t work out. I moved on to low-G with was better. Then I went insane and decided to drag my aNueNue harp ukulele out of deep storage.
The harp strings on the uke are supposed to be tuned C, D, E, F. But I retuned the bottom two to A. One to pluck and the other to give a bit of sympathetic resonance. The sympathetic resonance turned out quite well. You can particularly hear the reverb-like effect at the beginning.
Important: The letters above the tab represent the bass note being played in that bar they’re not the chords.
The strings tabbed are just tuned like a normal low-G. And it’s tabbed in the same key as the original. So if you’re playing a low-G you can just play this tab along with the record or a bass-playing friend.
To play it with a high-g ukulele you’ll need to move the whole thing up an octave. Here’s a tab for that. This time with the chord names above the tab.