After posting this tune a few weeks ago on the UkeTube I immediately got a couple of tab requests. And Alexander “DerMitDerUkulele” Wandrowsky was kind enough to send me his tab. Two versions, in fact. The one above is in D tuning as it’s played in the video. And here’s one in F minor and played in standard tuning:
I absolutely love this tune so I had to have a crack at my own arrangement.
I’m playing it in G minor but in C-tuning. I start of playing the tune campanella style. Then go into combining the melody and chords. Then back to the campanella style to rip through the tune at double(ish) speed.
Another one for the Riffs for Ukulele series. Usual rules apply: they’re intended to be played for a lark (even more so with these punk pop songs); no, I’m not going to write up the full song; and they’re not necessarily in the original key (although only Sum 41 in this post isn’t thanks to some capo deployment).
After a bit of octave shifting the arpeggio riff in this one works way better on ukulele than I was expecting. Thumb and two finger picking for this one again. Try to emphasise the notes on the g- and C-strings.
Capo on the first fret for this one too. The switch from G to F at the end of bar two is very fast. If you’re struggling with it you can just switch the F for playing all the strings open like at the end of bar 4.
I’m not sure if this one entirely belongs in this post. But I’ve become obsessed with it recently. I tried to get all the discordant bits in. Which makes it much more difficult than it needs to be. Here’s a simpler version:
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?
Trickiest Bits
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.
Have to admit, I’ve never actually seen Unforgiven. It’s a western with Clint Eastwood and that’s about all I know. But I got a request for Claudia’s Theme, gave it a listen and loved it. Plus it seems ideal for the uke.
The original starts in the key of E before switching to F. But I stuck to the more uke-friendly F for my arrangement.
The intro and outro are very sparse. If you catch me nodding my head in those sections that’s me trying to keep time. It’s very tempting to rush these bits. But I’d recommend trying as hard as you can to hold it back.
To give you an idea of the tabs in the Christmas Ukulele III ebook, here’s an arrangement in the same styles and with a similar difficulty.
The Little Drummer Boy is (supposed to be) based on an old Czech folk melody. But it only became well known when rearranged and given lyrics in the 1950s for the Harry Simeone Chorale version.
This arrangement is designed to be played solo. It can all be played with your thumb on your picking hand. When you play more than one string just strum your thumb down until you hit the last note in the chord.
The notes in brackets here are backing notes. They’re not part of the melody so play them softly.
This version is even simpler. It splits up the chords and the melody into different parts. So you can play this version with a friend or with this MP3. It’s stereo split so you can play along with either the chords or the melody.
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard this tune. Several hundred I expect. But not once did it occur to me that there might be a reason he’s going on about tossed salads and scrambled eggs. Frasier writer, Ken Levine asked the tune’s composer Bruce Miller who explained, “these were things that were “mixed up” like Frasier Crane’s patients”.
And it’s not just the patients. The theme is a mixed up, mouse painting, moon howling kinda song. For a tune that only lasts 36 seconds this really packs in a lot of different notes. My advice is to throw yourself into it an not worry much about any mistakes.
I had to do this tab to celebrate the finale of the first series of Serial. The plinkiness of it was just dying to be uked. To keep it extra-plinky it’s played right up the neck.
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.
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.
After last week’s two nightmaredifficulty posts something much more straight forward this week.
Like the original, I start my version off with just the melody. It’s a great traditionally inspired melody (written by the guys off of The Lumineers) and is plenty strong enough to hold your attention alone. I’m just picking this with my thumb but you can use fingers if you’re comfortable with that.
Then from bar 17 I introduce a few chords but still keep it very minimal. Again, I’m just using my thumb to play these. Strumming down the strings whenever there’s more than one note.
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.
If you’ve been following my riffs for ukulele series you’ll have heard me encourage you to use it more creatively than just playing one riff at a time. One way to use them is to cram a bunch of them together to make a melody. That’s what I did with my Arctic Monkeys medley and this collection of Strokes riffs.
The songs in this medley are:
Barely Legal/Take It Or Leave It/Hard to Explain/12:51/One Way Trigger/Reptilia/Barely Legal (again)/Someday/Under Cover of Darkness/Last Nite
I was inspired to arrange this one by Brooke Pallson’s ukulele version and somehow it’s taken me two years to get from that to a finished version. That might suggest it’s a deeply complex arrangement but it’s pretty easy to play (although I still manage to jack it up at about 1:20 in the video).
The trickiest bit is the solo section that starts in bar 31. The first four bars ape the keyboard solo and the next for the “ain’t nobody’s business” vocalising. It took me a bit of practice to be able to switch between those. They’re just similar enough and just different enough to make it tricky.
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.
Here’s another great tab by David Beckingham. This time of a tune by, ragtime blues innovator, Blind Blake.
Here are a few notes on the tune from David:
The arrangement has Blake’s intro, but I didn’t play it in the clip – mainly ‘cos it’s hard to fit it in with the backing track.
I’m using thumb and two fingers more than usual in this one. Blind Blake’s “sportin’ thumb” is a notoriously difficult thing to replicate and I’ve really just given up on authenticity and gone for fun (and added my own little variation up the neck)
Following on from ABBA, my other favourite Eurovision song is Luxembourg’s 1965 winner: France Gall’s Poupée de cire, Poupée de son (written by Serge Gainsbourg).
The only tricky part in this arrangement is the intro. Here I’m picking the A-string with my middle finger and everything else with my thumb.
From there on it’s all pretty simple. Everything is plucked with the thumb apart from a few bits of strumming (indicated by the arrows on the tab).
The tune works well as a solo piece but it’s a perfect piece for ukulele groups as it has parts for all abilities: simple chords for beginners, a picking part (below) for those starting on fingerpicking and the melody (above) for the show-offs.
The picking part is just the chords played arpeggio (i.e. one note at a time). Played against the melody part it sounds far more intricate than the simplicity of the two parts suggests.
And here is a baritone version of both parts for the bariukers in the group. It’s in the same key as the standard tuning tab so they can be played together.
I put Choan’s marvellous version of If I Had You (most known to me in Cliff Edwards’ ukulele version) on the UkeTube a while back. And he was kind enough to send me his tab of it.
The whole piece is full of interesting chord ideas. Even if you’re not going to learn the whole thing I’d recommend playing through the intro (bars 1 and 2), the turnaround (bars 9 and 10) and the outro (bars 30 – 33). You can use these directly in a jazzy piece in A or adapt them for other keys.
Continuing the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain’s 30th Anniversary celebrations with my first attempt at doing a UOGB style version of one of their tunes: Misirlou (most famous as the Pulp Fiction intro played by Dick Dale). I had a lot of fun putting it together and it gave me a new level of appreciation for what they do.
My arrangement is based on theirs but pared down to four ukes and a guitar/bass part.
This is main melody of the tune. I don’t use the g-string here so you can use either high- or low-G. It’s played with a pick.
There are two bits of notation you might not be familiar with. The dots above the notes in the first few bars and the last few bars indicate that the notes are played staccato i.e. they’re very short. The two thick lines under notes in the loud section (bars 38 – 70) mean the note is tremolo picked. More on tremolo picking here.
This part is very simple for the first half of the track. It’s just two notes strummed – – d u – – d – (the same pattern as the rhythm guitar in Dick Dale’s version).
I don’t have a bass (I’m not an animal) so I used a guitar for the bass part. But I’m just using the bottom four strings so you can transfer this tab directly to bass or bass ukulele.
Percussive Ukulele
This part has the least to do. In the intro and outro it makes the very high notes by picking the strings above the bridge. Then in the loud section (bars 38 – 70) it strums all the strings muted with the left hand in the same pattern as the rhythm ukulele in the quiet sections i.e. – – d u – – d -.
There’s no baritone on the track but here’s a baritone version of the lead ukulele part.
Alternatively, you could just play the lead tab for standard tuning on a baritone as it is. For example, if the standard tuning tab says 3rd string (C) 4th fret then you’d play the baritone 3rd string (G), 4th fret. That provides a readymade harmony for the lead part. But it does clash with the second uke sometimes so don’t use them both.
