How to Play Ukulele: A Complete Guide for Beginners

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This book is dedicated to those who seek peace through music.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1. Getting to Know Your Ukulele

Who Invented the Ukulele?

Ukulele Parts

Tuning Your Ukulele

Chapter 2. Rhythm

The One-Finger Chord

Start with a Strum

The Ukulele Player’s Toolbox

A Final Word on Strumming

Chapter 3. Harmony

Understanding Chords

Major versus Minor

One, Four, Five

 Buffalo Gals

 Oh! Susanna

 Home on the Range

Chapter 4. Melody

Learning Melodies

Scales

The Melodic Minor Scale

Intervals

Chords and Scales

Inside Picking

Implying the Melody

Chapter 5. Doo-Dads

The Muffle

Hammer-Ons, Pull-Offs, and Slides

Snap, Warble, and Ring

The Glissando and Two-Finger Trill

Percussion

The Tritone Scramble

Chapter 6. Let’s Play

Learning Songs

Enough Already. Let’s Play

 It Ain’t Gonna’ Rain No More

 Leavin’ in the Morning

 Fog Dog Blues

 Home on the Range

 Greensleeves

 Annie Laurie

 Don’t Do Any Better

 Supplicant Sally

 Liquid Times

 Beautiful Dreamer

 Why Not Pretend It’s True?

 Hymn Song

 Good to Have You Here

 10,000 Ukuleles

Chapter 7. Keeping On

Play with Others

Form a Group

Don’t Be a Jukebox, Use It!

Sound of Silence

Record Yourself

Get Into Ukulele Lore

Teach Someone

Just Play

Chapter 8. Chords

The Chord Collection

A♭ Chords

A Chords

B♭ Chords

B Chords

C Chords

C♯ Chords

D Chords

E♭ Chords

E Chords

F Chords

F♯ Chords

G Chords

Changing Keys

Common Chord Patterns

The Circle of Fifths

Appendix A. Glossary

Appendix B. Resources

Cyber Connections: Players and Teachers

Ukulele Publications and Media

Ukulele Festivals

Ukulele Clubs

Ukulele Manufacturers

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Index

INTRODUCTION

Hooray for taking up the ukulele! It will never let you down. People of all ages make great music with it, and they reap huge rewards from this instrument with the sweet, happy voice and glorious past.

Many people are pleasantly surprised to learn that once they pick up the ukulele, they instantly become members of a thriving, worldwide community—folks who love the ukulele, regardless of skill level or how long they have been playing. This vast community of enthusiastic players cheerily share what they have learned and are eager to find something new to play: a song, perhaps, or strum, or technique. The quest to conquer a strumming or picking pattern, tune, or style never ends. Be ready to learn from others and rejoice when you unexpectedly find yourself teaching another player something you have mastered. (The more often you teach others, the better player you become.) It’s all part of being a ukulele player, an instrument with a great history and treasure chest of lore.

Although there have been ukulele groups, clubs, and festivals since the turn of the last century, they have swelled in recent times and popped up all over the world. International ukulele festivals, meet-ups, jams, and ceilidhs (parties with music, dancing, and storytelling) bring people together from many countries in an exhilarating atmosphere.

The ukulele gives voice to every kind of music: rock and roll, folk, Dixieland, country western, blues, classical, bluegrass, sacred, and more. We’ll take a gander at many of them and try some on for size and fit—and, of course, for the fun of it.

After a brief history and handy tour of the instrument itself, this book will give you a bump start so you can begin playing the ukulele right away.

The book follows the three basic elements of music: rhythm, harmony, and melody. Rhythm is that part of music that you dance or tap your toe to. So much of playing the ukulele is in the strums you choose. We’ll explore a variety of them, and other rhythm techniques, using familiar tunes. You don’t want to miss this chapter.

Harmony is two or more notes played together that please the ear. Most often three notes are used in what is called a chord. Chords change during a song and form a kind of architecture or skeleton of the song. Chords enrich our songs with emotion and, sometimes, suspense and resolution. This is a chapter you will want to visit often and consider to be a space where growth never ends. Some chords may seem at first as if you will never be able to play them. But you can. I’ll show you how.

Melody is that part of a song you can whistle, hum, or sing. It consists of individual notes that rise and fall and have long or short durations. It’s the part of a song we are quickest to recognize. To capture the idea of melody, we will explore a variety of scales—note sequences. It will be fun.

Doo-dads are things you can goof around with on the ukulele that don’t easily fall into any of the previously listed categories. They tend to be fun and can give your playing personality. Good to know.

Songs are what happens when you play music. This chapter will feature a few easy-to-play songs, a few that are a little more challenging, and a couple of what I like to call stretch out tunes: tunes that you might want to take a year or two to get into your DNA. I started working on Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust in 1961 and didn’t really feel as if I owned it until about 1990. Truly a stretch out song. The more you work on the hard songs, the more other songs become a piece of cake to learn.

Keeping On is about practicing and learning and, well, keeping on track while gathering your ukulele skills. A small repository of practical advice.

Reference (Chapter 8 and Appendix A) includes a glossary of ukulele and music terminology, some useful chord charts, substitutions, and an explanation of the Circle of Fifths. Hopefully, it’ll be a handy place to peek at once in a while.

Resources provides links to ukulele clubs, groups, festivals, players, songs, and videos. I hope they don’t tie you up on the Internet so much that you don’t have time to play your ukulele!

Okay, now let’s get ukin’.

—Dan Cool Hand Uke Scanlan

In this chapter, you’ll get to know your ukulele—where it came from, what each part does, and general advice on how to hold it and take care of it so you can keep your ukulele healthy and in good shape. Let’s begin the tour.

Who Invented the Ukulele?

The ukulele was invented in 1879 when three enterprising woodworkers from Madeira Island, a Portuguese island off the coast of North Africa, arrived in Hawaii looking for business with their fellow countrymen already living there. Well, business wasn’t looking good, and Manuel Nunes and his friends Augusto Dias and José do Espirito Santo knew they needed to get creative to survive.

When the three arrived in Hawaii on the ship SS Ravenscrag with some 300 other Madeirans, fellow passenger João Fernandes danced down the gangplank playing a braguinha, a small four-string Madeiran folk instrument. This high-pitched, energetically played instrument tickled the Hawaiians. That’s when Nunes, Dias, and Santo realized they might be onto something: could they make a living by combining two popular folk instruments of their island—the rajão and the braguinha?

The rajão was a five-string Madeiran folk instrument, smaller than a guitar but using similar fingering formations. It had no bass string, but it did have re-entrant tuning (to be discussed later in this chapter). The strings were tuned DGCEA with the D and G strings tuned a whole octave higher than one would expect. The men took the four strings from the rajão (the GCE and A) and placed them on the smaller braguinha. (In effect, the ukulele took its size from the braguinha and its tuning from the rajão.) They called their new invention the mini rajão.

When they were finished, the trio wisely took their mini rajão to King David Kalakaua, the last monarch of Hawaii, who was a guitar player. The king could instantly play it and loved it. Soon the Hawaiian people fell in love with it as well. It’s safe to say that in 1879, the rajão and the braguinha went to Hawaii, married, and gave birth to the ukulele.

By 1900, the ukulele had firmly earned its place in Hawaiian history. It became Hawaii’s favorite souvenir (some historians assert the ukulele was the world’s first official souvenir of any nation), and Hawaiian bands featuring the ukulele began touring the United States.

Ukulele Parts

UKE TIP

So, what about the strange name? Ukulele is most likely a pun based on lele, meaning to jump, and ukeke, a one-string mouth harp indigenous to Hawaii. Because of the energetic way it is played, ukulele is often translated as jumping flea, a concept that led to the familiar mnemonic my dog has fleas, which is used for tuning. King Kalakaua’s sister, Princess Lili’uokalani, who also quickly took to the instrument (and whose song Aloha ‘Oe became one of the first tunes associated with it), preferred the translation "the