Archive for the ‘Ukulele’ Category

I have a new hero

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

… but not a Guitar Hero …

Novelties

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

Swallow Hill will be hosting a Ukulele Festival in a few weeks. As far as I’m aware, it will be Denver’s first. Should be fun. I’m still trying to decide which ticket level I want to purchase, and what I want to practice up for the open stage (if I decide to get up on the open stage).

A couple of weeks earlier, we’ll have the regular Denver area ukulele group meeting at Swallow Hill. I missed the December meeting, at which musical themes were decided for the upcoming year. January’s theme is “Novelty Songs.” That happens to be the type of song that is probably my favorite – I know lots of them. Most, unfortunately, I can sing. As opposed to sing while playing, that is. Singing while playing is a skill I’m working on, complicated by the fact that I don’t know how to play many of the songs I can sing.

In any case, I have a few such I can already perform (such as Their Brains Were Small and They Died, Don’t Pet The Dog, and It’s Hard to be Humble), and I’m working on more. I can play and sing Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport – I just need to make them happen simultaneously. I’ve been working out the chords for The Witch Doctor Song (“Ting tang walla walla bing bang”). It was pretty straightforward getting the chorus to sound nice when I tried to play it in C, but I couldn’t make progress on the bridge until I retried it in A.

It’s a matter of finding the right sound, and I couldn’t find the right sounds up the neck in C. I’m actually better at working out chords on the banjo, but sometimes that doesn’t produce things that sound good to me on a uke. As an illustration, I found some chords online for Madiera, M’Dear, but I couldn’t get them to sound right on the uke. That may be due to the fact that I’m more familiar with a version by Dan Murphy, and not with the Flanders & Swann version.

To finish, here are a couple of novelty songs for your enjoyment. The first is via Bits and Pieces, and the second via The Last of the Few (site NSFW).

Fun with language(s)

Sunday, October 21st, 2007

Stay tuned for tonight’s feature. But first, a word from our sponsor:

And, now, back to our feature:

Via Bookworm Room and Absolute Moral Authority.

Lyrical Links

Sunday, March 25th, 2007

Just to keep them handy, I’m going to put up a bunch of links for lyrics and chords, mostly (but not all) for uke.

Ukulele Boogaloo has almost 300 songs with chords and ukelele chord diagrams. Unfortunately, not all of the songs have complete chord diagrams.

Dominator’s tabs are very well done, but tend to be for more accomplished players.

Akulele has a few nice fingerpicking tabs for uke. I intend to learn Tico-tico sometime, but I came up with my own version of Carol of the Bells. Akulele’s is a bit more sophisticated, I think.

The 4th Peg has some PDFs of some of my favorite songs. I recently gave away my printout of A Summer Song, and had to go here to replace it.

Sing-along Folk, Rock, and Guitar Songs isn’t ukulele-specific, but it’s got lyrics and chords for a lot of good songs.

Neither is Betty Lou’s site specific to ukuleles, but she also has chords and lyrics for a lot of songs. I’ve noticed a few errors in the lyrics for some of the songs I’ve grabbed from there, but it’s still a valuable resource.

Jim Bottorff’s Banjo Page has lyrics and chords for a lot of (mostly) traditional songs, along with midi files if you don’t know the tunes.

Dr. Uke has mostly older songs on his site.

Nalu Music has tablature for a few pieces of classical music.

There are about half-a-dozen songs available at Australele. They have a unique presentation of the chords in the files.

The Ukulele Vault isn’t strictly a lyrics&chords site, but it has periodic presentations of such.

There are 100 songs available at Tropical Storm Hawaii. I don’t recognize most of them, probably because I’m too old (or have taste … take your choice).

Finally, Richard Gillman has a valuable set of links to ukulele sites.