Playing and enjoying the ukulele together!
If the teacher is Ralph Shaw you know it is going to be special. This mini lesson is no exception. LIven up your strumming with this George Formby strum.
If you aren’t familiar with Mr. Formby, check out this Wikipedia article.
Click here for the article and music excerpts on UkuleleMagazine.com.
As part of her #30DayUkuleleChallenge ‘Bernadette Teaches Music’ provided a YouTube video listing and demonstrating the most important ukulele chords.
Of course, most of them are the common ones. A few of them , however, are good alternate chords by moving a barr chord up the fretboard (example: moving B flat up to form C, D and E.
Have you seen the series of ukulele books from Hal Leonard called, ‘Strum Together’?
The ‘Together’ part is cool – each song has the chords for the following:
They are intended for casual jams with friends who play other instruments. Since the purpose of them is to allow people with different instruments who may not have played together the arrangements are not difficult.
They are also great for ukulele classes since they give both the standard ukulele chords and the baritone chords.
The music is on the right side page and the chords are on the left side
I have three of them:
There are a few duplicates among the three books…
I have these marked on and in my books if you’d like to see them.
There are three others…
The series can be found here. The names of the songs in each book are listed there.
I know that a couple of them was arranged by Mark Phillips but I don’t know about the others.
Below is an example of the chords page…
The song is on the right side with the chord names, the melody and the lyrics.
‘Brian’s huge chordlist collection‘ is a great resource for looking up alternative chords.
It is especially useful if you already know the basic chords. It may be a little confusing if you don’t know what the basic chords are – for example, the basic chord for ‘C’ is in the bottom 2 rows…the top left one, of course.
If you don’t know the basic ones, you may want to just look for the most simplified chord (fewest fingers and closest to the nut or the head of the ukulele.
It should be a big (okay, a ‘HUGE’) help to those that are looking for more chords!
The printed music/notes for the video are in the comments or here – https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B62zBAbDVZxXeWJxNkdDbVdiUUU/view
Do you like a little ‘Funk’? Who doesn’t, sometime?!?!
This is super easy and fun. Just awesome!
The only hard part is that you have to barr the chord (only 2nd if you leave 1st one open).
Relax the barr finger occasionally (maybe 2nd and 4th beats) to add different mute / percussive sounds and to relax the fingers.
Roy Sakuma created and offers a nice chord chart that groups chords by progressions within keys.
For example: In the key of C he put the following chords:
i = C | vi = Am | iv = F | V7 = G7 | iii = Em | ii7 = Dm7
This is a great way to practice chords.
TinyCards.com (from DuoLingo.com) is a great tool for creating flashcards. You can save the individual chords from UkuleleGo.com and paste them into the flashcard maker. Here is an example I created.
Ukulele Chord Cubes would be great to use like dice or something like that. Here are some sold by Ukulele Magazine.
