Why not try livening up your playing by using a few different chord voicings?
Most regular ukulele songsheets often only give the basic open or first position chords but it’s possible to play each chord in numerous ways just by finding the same selection of notes elsewhere on your fretboard. By experimenting and trying a few of these out you can add texture and interest to even basic songs.
Chords.cc is a handy website that gives you chord shapes for a number of stringed instruments, including three tunings of ukulele, banjos, guitars, mandolins and more. In addition to showing fingering alternatives for a good selection of chord types, there are nice advanced features where you can customise it to show left-handed chords; open strings or not; rootless voicings; maximum stretch (good if you have short fingers); whether to include muted strings; and a ‘how many fingers’ options (approximating how you might play the chord).
Here’s the standard layout for a regular gCEA tuned uke for C major:
Other options are being added by user request, including the ability to zoom in on the chords to see more detail if you’re on a mobile device and to generate PDFs.
If you’ve just received your first ukulele, then have a look round our site for playing tips, such as our New Uke For Xmas? article which directs you to some beginners’ guide and handy resources. Or search down the right hand side of the page for the many topics we cover.
Should you wish to buy a uke, check out our recommendations for decent starter instruments in Good Buy To All That….
For those of you wishing to access some online lessons, James Hill’s Booster Uke is free until the end of Jan 2017, which will get you moving up & down the fretboard.
For a bit of a workout, why not try out the Chord Quiz on Ukulele Go or head over to Uke Hunt’s more challenging Ukulele Quiz 2016.
Over the last few weeks, both Chris & Simon have mentioned how useful it can be to play the same song in a number of different keys, to expand your repertoire to learn the full range of chords. It is also a good way to start understanding more about music theory; to see how chords relate to musical keys & begin understanding how transposing works (ie putting tunes in another key).
If you look on several song sites, such as Chordie or Tontonremy & find a song you want to play, there are options on the page to trranspose it, so with a quick press of a button, you can have the song in a new key. Or you can use the PLUC Transposing Tool to work it out manually. Read the rest of this entry »
Two different people asked me about musical keys this week.
A key is a collection of notes in a particular pattern. If you start singing a song on one note & then sing the same song but begin it on a different note, it’s still the same song but is in a different key.You’ll also have to play different chords to make it sound right.
Here are two different versions of The Kinks’ Lola – one on Ukulele Boogaloo & one from Richard G’s Songbook. You’ll notice the difference when you play them – you might find the chords easier to play in one version or that you can sing along better on one. Read the rest of this entry »
The film Made In Dagenham is on BBC2 later tonight, with a cracking Sixties soundtrack accompanying the action. We’ve already featured a uke cover of Sandie Shaw’s (There’s) Always Something There To Remind Me, so here’s paxukulele’s smiley version of The Mindbenders’ hit A Groovy Kind of Love:
Raiding various songbooks & YouTubes for the chords to other tracks from the soundtrack:
Test how well you can identify chords using the Guitarator Chord Quiz. Choose the chords you want to test out (eg major, minor & seventh) and then start the quiz.
As today would have been George Harrison’s seventieth birthday, here’s a video from his final album Brainwashed where he’s ukeing with a few pals on the Harold Arlen & Ted Koehle number Between The Devil & The Deep Blue Sea:
