ukulele lessons Archives

June 19, 2022June 19, 2022

4 Good Reasons to Tune Your Soprano Uke in 5ths, and 1 Great One

Fun factoid…. Avocados are not a vegetable. They are a berry. A single seeded berry. So if an avocado ain’t gotta be what it (obviously) is, then a ukulele can be a mandolin! That is to say that a soprano ukulele can be tuned in 5ths, just like a mandolin or violin with some help from a custom-gauge set of strings.

BUT HOW?

Since a ukulele isn’t specifically engineered to be tuned with the tension required for 5^th tuning (E-A-D-G) you absolutely have to get your string gauges perfect to adapt the machine that is your ukulele to a more high-tension tuning. Aguila is one of the companies that makes a custom gauge set of string for 5^th tuning, and they are fairly easy to find. SO please start by restringing your uke. As a note, it really doesn’t work well to tune the 5^th tuning gauges to a standard tuning, so… you hear it coming… maybe you need to get another uke just for this experiment. I have a couple soprano ukes so I was set to go.

BUT WHY? (Here are 4 good reasons and 1 great one)

1: It gives you another voice to layer into your ukulele playing. This sounds nothing like a uke, more punchy like a mandolin, but kinda harsh like plucking a violin with a pick.

2: You will get to explore learning something new. If you don’t know anything about a mandolin, you should grab a chord chart, and maybe some tablature for some old fiddle tunes. Mando lin tablature is written on just four lines, so you wont have any trouble using it for a 5^th tuned ukulele.

3: Very few other musicians, especially folk musicians, take this approach… So that means you aren’t copying ANYONE! That also you can’t do it wrong… In fact, you are the trendsetter. Getting on at the ground floor is pretty cool.

4: It is really fun to be the unique musician in a jam session, and this will a but assure that will be the case. Just before writing this blog is the first time I have tried tuning a uke in 5ths, and I can’t wait to give it a more public premier.

5: You will develop new techniques that inform and influence your playing on other instruments. This could be the best reason of all. I found that when tuned in 5ths, my soprano uke would kind of “wolf note” on any open string when soloing. So I tried to palm mute everything. This ended up sounding pleasantly “pizzicato” (when a violin is being plucked instead of bowed). After doing this I started trying to incorporate the pizzicato effect into playing the mandolin. I have always palm muted the mandolin, but not so much that the notes sounded super plucky. So, my mandolin playing evolved as a result of playing the uke tuned in 5ths.

MOVING FORWARD

If you would like to try this approach, please please please visit your favorite local music store first and pick up a set of ukulele strings designed for 5^th tuning. Shopping local first is the best default strategy anytime! Please support your neighbors.

If you need to shop on the internet your favorite string shop probably has them available, and if you are an Amazon shopper, I have a link below to the strings I bought.

Also, I have a little YouTube of my 5^th-tuned-uke experiment below. If you watch the video please watch through to the very end… I just really like the little cartoon of me on the very end of video – no other reason – just want to share the funny.

https://youtu.be/WADAwqm-bGY

FREE stuff!

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Take a leisurely look at my general store where I keep some links to important things that you can buy to help your pickin’. >>> Link to NekkidMusic.com general store <<<

Thanks for stoppin’ by today! Ya’ll come back and we’ll do some pickin’.

August 10, 2020August 10, 2020

B-Flat Tenor Uke Set Up

Just a quick note about my tenor ukulele set up that I thought y’all might like to try…

Y’all ever head the old axiom, “when you are a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail?” Such is the life of a banjo player. Now, I learnt the uke long before I ever touched a banjo, but I really took to the banjo. Then when my joints started giving me peedoodles I discovered slack key tunings for uke and guitar as a bit of a compensation. It was easier on my hands AND I could translate a ton of cool banjo stuff since the fingering closely resembles open G tuning on a 5-string banjo.

Tuning

Today, my go-to set up for tenor uke is to tune the uke a step lower than standard, drop the first string another step, and use a wound 4th string. So my tuning is F (wound 4th string), B-Flat, D, and high F. That slack key pattern makes an open B-Flat chord. Tuning down a step from standard also gives me another voice between my soprano, (as well as concert, and my-dog-has-fleas tenor) and my baritone ukes.

Strings and Action

One of the issues with some uke strings is that the plain strings are often quite a bit more mellow than the wound strings, and sometimes using a drop 4^th (wound string – tuned an octave lower than the “my dog has fleas” standard) exacerbates this issue. I love the tensile and string-to-string consistency of the Aguila Red strings. Also they feel much like higher tension strings so the need to have just a tab higher action to compensate for three strings being tuned a step low, and one string two steps down, is mitigated just a bit. So I just need to nudge the action a bit from where most uke pickers keep it. I am at a slight 2.0mm on the 4^th at the 12^th fret with a capo on the 1^st fret. I keep the nut action as low as I dare so the capo really doesn’t make much difference. Today my drop 4^th tenor has a flat fingerboard, so that makes it feel even more “banjo-like.”

Demonstration

Below is my YouTube video demonstrating this set up with a few great old standard tunes, as well as a link to the kit with some of the products I mention in this blog…

https://kit.co/NekkidMusic.com/tenor-uke-kit

Y’all come back and we’ll do some pickin!

Timmy

February 18, 2020May 17, 2020

Thee Insanely Cool Ukulele Chords

Yookin’ good!

I love playing acoustic string instruments, and I am simply infatuated with the ukulele. I come from South Carolina, where we call this little instrument, a yook-LAY-lee. I know that’s not the correct pronunciation, but we also consider pimento cheese and shrimp-n-grits the two food groups that make up the base of the nutrition pyramid. It’s a Southern thing.

One of the things I like best about the ukulele when played in American folk music, even in hillbilly music, is that you can vamp really cool chords and bless a song with something totally fresh and jazzy that other instruments may need to stray way outside of their traditional space to accomplish without distraction. Three of these favorite insanely cool “blessings” are: the root 6^th chord, root augmented chord, and second diminished chord. I LOL’d writing this. I was just remembering my old Dad calling them “augminished and demented chords…” I miss ya, Pop.

Let’s Look at the chords

A major chord has a root note, a third note, and a fifth note. In the G chord, for instance, that is G (root), B (third), and D (fifth). Think of the “numbers” in terms of the major scale… Do (G – root), Re (A – 2^nd),Me (B – 3^rd), Fa (C – 4^th), So (D – 5^th), La (E – 6^th), Si (F sharp – 7^th), Do (G- octave).

Root 6^th

G 6^th would simply be adding a sixth note (E) to the G chord shape.

Root augmented

In the root augmented chord (in the example G augmented) we just replace the fifth note with a sharp fifth note – or D sharp note.

Second diminished

The second chord in the key of G is A major. We use the diminished shape of the second chord. Which will have us flat the 3^rd and the fifth note of the A major chord. So the A diminished chord triad is A, C and D sharp (E flat).

Chord shapes in standard (my dog has fleas) tuning, and slack-key tuning for baritone ukulele.

Note that the Chord symbol for augmented is a little “+” sign, and diminished is a little “o” shape.

Now the cool stuff

As an example, we will use the G augmented chord as a transition to get us into the C chord and the A diminished chord to transition us from C back to G. The G 6^th chord will simply be the root chord that we resolve into and finish with. Try this progression…

G /// G+ /// C /// Ao /// G/// D7/// G6 ///

Note that these chord shapes work the same for soprano or tenor ukuleles, however, when playing the soprano or tenor ukulele these shapes will be the key of C. ( C C+ Do G7 C6^th )

Please take a look at my video demonstration of a couple of examples of the ukulele applying these cool chords to a standard folk song.

So when you pick up that ukulele, spice with augminished, demented, and 6^th chords to taste… and enjoy some insanely cool pickin’.

FREE stuff!

Also please take a look at my general store when I keep some links to important things that you can buy to help your pickin’. >>> Link to NekkidMusic.com general store <<<