Ukulele For Dummies (6 page)
Read Ukulele For Dummies Online
Authors: Alistair Wood
If your ukulele has friction tuners, you may need to tighten the screws that hold them to the headstock. If your ukulele goes out of tune as soon as you've tuned it, check the tuners. If you can see them unfurl, tighten the screw.
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Geared tuners
: Some ukuleles have geared tuners (as shown in Figure 1-2), which stick out from the side of the headstock like ears (the type of tuners you get on guitars).
Geared tuners make fine-tuning easier and help your uke to hold the tuning better. So unless a ukulele comes with high-quality friction tuners, your best bet is to buy one with geared tuners.
Figure 1-2:
Geared tuners.
Becoming a Well-Versed Ukulele Player
The ukulele has gone from niche, local instrument to worldwide phenomenon. This journey, and the ways in which various countries and cultures picked up the ukulele, reveals the instrument's development and signposts you towards the different skills you should strive to master as you make your way through
Ukulele For Dummies
.
Strumming along to hula in Hawaii
The first technique that you discover when starting out with your uke is strumming (which I look at in Chapters 4 to 6). The ukulele was originally strummed to provide accompaniment to traditional Hawaiian hula dancing.
Hula
is a very gentle, peaceful dance form. As you might expect, then, the ukulele is played in a lilting fashion when accompanying hula, which suits the uke's sound perfectly. This style conjures up the feeling of laidback life on a Hawaiian island, and you can hear its influence in the sound of modern songs that try to recapture that feeling.
If you want to play in the Hawaiian style, check out Chapter 13.
Inventing the ukulele
Rather than being a purely Hawaiian instrument, the ukulele has truly international roots.
When the ukulele was invented â towards the end of the 19th century â Hawaii was a mix of many nationalities: British, European, American, Chinese and Japanese people were all well represented on the islands. Power was still in the hands of the native Hawaiian monarchy but King David Kalakaua was fighting against strengthening foreign interests.
Madeira, a small Atlantic island belonging to Portugal, was one place supplying immigrant workers to Hawaii. In 1879 a ship called the
Ravenscrag
sailed from Madeira to Hawaii with three furniture makers on board who would go on to build the first ukuleles: Manuel Nunes, Augusto Dias and Jose Espirito Santo. These men brought with them two instruments that would influence the development of the ukulele: the
machete
(pronounced ma-shet) and
rajão
(pronounced ra-zyow). The machete was a small, four-stringed instrument and the rajão featured a tuning similar to that of the ukulele. As they developed their new instrument, the makers made a very important decision to build it out of koa wood, which is native to Hawaii. This wood is a very important royal symbol to the Hawaiians and an integral part of Hawaiian identity.
As part of his efforts to strengthen this Hawaiian identity and culture and protect the monarchy, King David Kalakaua leapt on the ukulele with enthusiasm. With his royal patronage, the instrument became embedded in Hawaiian culture very quickly. So much so that thinking of Hawaiian music without the ukulele is almost impossible.
Swinging and picking across the USA
When you've got to grips with strumming you can progress to picking single notes and playing solo (you can find out about these skills in Chapters 7 to 10) just as the early uke players did. In this way, those players took the uke into new genres of music and new countries, particularly the US. There, the uke proved popular with college students and became associated with the hip, young flappers who used it to pick early jazz tunes.
With just four strings to play with, the ukulele is begging to be used for playing the interesting chords and rhythms of jazz. The ukulele responds fantastically to rapid playing and complex rhythms, making it a great accompaniment to jazz.
You can try out some of these tunes yourself in Chapter 14.
Rockin' and rollin', and getting down with the blues
In your own search for music to play, rock, blues and punk might not be the first styles that spring to mind but they are fertile ground for uke players.
In 1950s America, Arthur Godfrey, a TV star of the day, endorsed a new development: the plastic ukulele. This made the ukulele cheaper and, with Godfrey giving lessons on the TV, easier to learn. This increasing popularity helped the ukulele spread to other genres. For example, a blues musician called Rabbit Muse started using the ukulele to produce styles of music never before heard on the uke. People then began to use the ukulele for playing blues chord progressions from the famous 12-bar blues to up-tempo country blues and as a solo instrument for playing lead lines in blues songs.
Chapter 12 covers blues on the ukulele if you want to follow in Rabbit Muse's footsteps.
The 1950s saw blues give birth to rock and roll, which in turn led to rock and punk. Although the ukulele declined in popularity around this time â the one famous ukulele player of the 1960s was Tiny Tim, who used the instrument as part of his jokey act and resurrected old jazz tunes such as âTiptoe Through the Tulips' â some very famous musicians remained uke fans. Paul McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison all played ukulele. Harrison, Brian May (of Queen) and Pete Townshend (The Who) all played ukulele on songs released during the 1970s.
With a history of rock gods like that all playing your new favourite instrument, you just have to repay the favour and try out some rock tunes on your ukulele. No matter how loud, distorted and unukulele-like a song seems, if it's a good song it will always respond well to being transported to the ukulele. As soon as you've learned a few rock tricks, you'll be able to adapt rock songs to ukulele and see how they work for yourself.
You can emulate these rock gods by picking up rock uke tips in Chapter 11.
Diversifying into ever more styles
If jazz, rock and blues aren't your thing, think about casting your net further afield for inspiration. Ever heard of Jawaiian music? No? Well, read on.
The ukulele experienced a resurgence in popularity in the 1990s just as Hawaiian music became rejuvenated and influenced by the reggae music of Jamaica â the resulting genre is called
Jawaiian
. The Jawaiian style took the traditional Hawaiian style and infused it with reggae strumming patterns and chord progressions. Playing reggae on ukulele immediately gives you this mix of Jamaican and Hawaiian sounds, making it the perfect instrument for this style. Israel Kamakaâwiwole's Jawaiian-style cover of âOver the Rainbow' became a huge hit and was used in an endless run of films, TV shows and adverts.
You can pick up some reggae ukulele moves in Chapter 15.
As you've wisely picked up this copy of
Ukulele For Dummies
,
you're part of the current revival, which stretches into the 21st century and is perhaps the most extensive revival of all. Thinking of a musical genre that the uke has left untouched is difficult nowadays â even the traditional Proms series of classical music concerts in the UK has seen a sell-out performance by the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain (Chapter 16 covers playing classical pieces on the uke).
If classical music appeals to you, you might be surprised to discover that you can adapt many classical pieces to work on the ukulele. A particularly fertile area in which to find classical pieces for ukulele is in the classical guitar repertoire. Because the two instruments are similar, you can often effectively transfer pieces from one to the other. Even grand orchestral works can be played on ukulele, though. The old master composers wrote great melodies that are still effective when played unadorned on a ukulele.
Today, the uke can truly be called a globally played and appreciated instrument. You can play any imaginable genre and style of music on the ukulele. You can even hear the ukulele in the pop charts, from hip-hop act Janelle Monae to indie bands such as Beirut and pop stars Train.
So, read on and don't be left out!
Chapter 2
Tuning Up to Sound Great
In This Chapter
Discovering the basic musical terms
Turning on to tuning up
Deciding which tuning to use
Examining various ways to tune
I
'm sure that you've heard the various parts of an orchestra tuning up before a concert; that's because musical instruments need to be tuned before they can be played harmoniously. This process is easier for some instruments than others: for example, those rich, lazy piano players hire someone to tune their instruments for them. Humble ukulele players, however, have to tune up themselves, which can be a chore (but allows us to feel superior!).
Tuning your uke properly is vital â it's the difference between making a pleasant sound and sounding like a cat stuck in barbed wire. When you tune your uke, you're adjusting the pitch of the strings so that:
The strings are in tune with each other. For example, if you play a B note on the thinnest, highest-pitched string (the A-string) it sounds the same as a B played on the g-string.
The ukulele is in tune with other instruments. For example, an A chord on your ukulele sounds the same as an A chord on a guitar.
In this chapter, I explain the tuning process so you can be sure that you always make a beautiful sound when you play. Along with that, I explain a few terms involved in the tuning process (so you'll know how to refer to strings, frets and notes) and some musical terms (like
chords
and
scales
) that you'll hear all the time on your musical journey. So read on . . .
Knowing Some Musical Terms
When learning to play an instrument, you're going to come across a huge pile of musical jargon. Enough is out there to fill a whole book, and in fact you may want to check out
Music Theory For Dummies
by Michael Pilhofer and Holly Day (Wiley) to find out more. In this section, however, I go over just a few of the musical words and concepts that you're sure to encounter.
Notes as letters
In music, notes are given the names of letters A to G. After G, the letters go straight back to A.
In order to confuse the uninitiated, the musical alphabet starts with C, and that's handy for ukulele players because the lowest note on the ukulele is middle-C (so called because the note is smack-dab in the middle of the piano's 88 keys).
To confuse matters, some notes lie between these letters: these are known as
sharps
and
flats
(the black keys on a piano). For example, the note between A and B can be called either A sharp or B flat (see Figure 2-1). But, and this is where it gets really confusing, not all letters have a note between them.
Figure 2-1:
Locating A
/B
on the piano.
Don't give yourself a headache by trying to remember all the sharps and flats at this stage. You're sure to pick them up as you go along. Just remember what the words mean when you come across them:
A sharp is represented by an italic hash sign:.