Here’s a version of Roy Orbison’s Crying. Which Rolling Stone declared the 69th greatest song of all time. Nice.
Roy Orbison’s unmistakeable falsetto is in full effect in this song. So the big challenge here is jumping up and now the neck accurately.
In the second chorus, the melody goes all the way up to the 15th fret. If you can’t access that fret on your uke, you can just play it the same as the first chorus. Or, if you really want to go for it, you could use artificial harmonics.
Here’s my take on, part-time uker and full time Belieber, Sufjan Stevens’s heartbreaking Casimir Pulaski Day. I also love Mikaela Davis’s harp cover, so a bit of that has snuck into the arrangement too.
The song gets much of its power from being blunt and straightforward. So I’ve kept the arrangement stark and tried to play it directly without too much emotion.
The picking is mostly thumb on the g- and C-strings and the index and middle on E and A respectively. The big exception is the rapid notes on the C-string at the end of each stanza e.g. bars 9 and 17. For those, I recommend using alternate picking as it’s too quick to comfortably play with your thumb.
The other big exception is the trumpet solo, where I switch to strumming to give things a lift.
While not quite in the league of November Rain, Guns N’ Roses’ acoustic lighter-swayer Patience is still a bit of an epic. So for this arrangement I’ve trimmed down the intro and outro and skipped the repeat of the verse and chorus.
The intro follows Axl’s whistling for the first four bars before playing the first solo section. Just a bit of bending to deal with here.
The main solo section starts in bar 28 with some sliding around. My favourite part is the lick in bar 32-33. I wasn’t sure if this bit was going to work on uke, but it ends up fitting neatly.
Things switch up in bar 39 for the outro with some loose strumming and a fun sliding solo section.
I found the melody in the outro (from bar 47 on) tricky to arrange. Usually, you’d have a G note over the G chord somewhere. But the melody sticks with the F# (E-string second fret) and A notes from the D chord. That makes it hard to pull out the chord changes in this section clearly. But if you keep the chord changes clear in your head you should navigate it okay.
More rock tabs
My tabs of Sweet Child O Mine and November Rain are both on the Uke Hunt Patreon for concert level backers and up.
The opening riff for REM’s Losing My Religion is a blast to play and fits nicely on the uke. I particularly like the riff on the G chord leading into the verse which I play campanella style.
At first, I was playing the chords with strums. But I switched to fingerpicking for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it makes the chords sharper and more mandolin-like. Secondly, it means you can keep the chords very short (by immediately stopping the strings ringing with your picking fingers) making the sound punchier. Even so, strumming is a perfectly legitimate way to go and lends the tune a different feel.
Things get a lot more miserable once Stipe turns up. I mostly play the verses and choruses with one finger per string picking. You can be fairly loose with these sections and don’t need to play everything note for note.
My second favourite part is the riff right at the end. It’s ultra simple but very effective. Well worth learning even if you don’t bother with the rest of the song as it’ll fit in many situations.
A pairing of two almost identically titled songs: Sam Cooke’s Wonderful World and Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World. One because of a Patreon request and the other in tribute to Maple the guitar dog.
The arrangement starts with the beautiful melody of What a Wonderful World. Nothing too difficult here. Be sure to make the melody notes stand out against the backing note. And prepare for bar 13 by barreing across the strings for the notes on the E-string, 1st fret in bar 12.
Things speed up for Wonderful World but the chords get simpler. I must have heard this song hundreds of times, but I didn’t have any recollection of the bridge section. It’s certainly more forgettable than the earworm of the verse and chorus.
My favourite part of Halo to play is the intro. It fits so nicely on the uke I decided to use it as the outro too. Things stay fairly straightforward to play in the verse. All that is played with one finger per string picking.
But in the bridge and chorus Beyonce stretches her vocal range which means a trip up the neck. The arrangement goes as high as the 14th fret where it’s tough to play cleanly. You’ll also need to pick more forcefully so to keep the volume of the note at the same level as notes lower on the neck.
The picking in the rest of the song is more haphazard. For the quick notes, I’m using alternate picking to keep up.
Following up Bob Dylan with another “Blue” song: When the Stars Go Blue by Ryan Adams (one of the many sensitive singer-songwriters I listened to who turned out to be a full-time shithead). Although it was a bigger hit when Bono and The Corrs covered it.
I’ve paired that with Semisonic’s only hit Closing Time as they have almost identical choruses.
There are at least five options when it comes to the best Bob Dylan album. And I’ve cycled through all of them. But currently it’s Blood on the Tracks. So here’s an arrangement of the opening track.
This tab is very straightforward. It’s mostly strummed with a few notes picked out here and there. The only big challenge is the stretch up to the 7th fret in bars 11 and 13. If you’re struggling with that, you can just play the note at the 5th fret and no one will notice.
The arrangement plays through the verse twice and ends with a solo. The solo is very loosely based on the harmonic part at the end of the original but is mostly just me bashing out whatever I feel like.
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.
Back when I spent entire days watching MTV, this song and More Than Words made up a good 30% of the airtime. I got heartily sick of it at the time. But I’ve mellowed on it.
The tune is very simple. Four chords and the melody doesn’t go higher than the third fret. The only slightly unusual part is on the “Yeah, yeah”s in bars 13, 15 and 17. If you want to make that super-simple, you can replace 5500 with 2000 and 543x with 003x and it won’t sound much different.
The original starts with an instrumental version of the chorus. But, since we’re playing that later, I came up with an intro based on the chords. Feel free to ditch it and come up with your own.