Afternoon.
The weekend before last I taught a ukulele strumming workshop for a local group, and as part of the deal, I promised that I’d do a little follow up on some of the ideas which people struggled with the most. Even if you’re not a ukulele player the content here can be easily adapted to the guitar or other similar instrument, so please take the time to have a look! Equally, to all you ukulele players, I did a blog about a strumming workshop I did for a guitar group a while back, have a look at that one too, you can find it here...
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Okay - let’s get to it.
The three parts of the lesson which caused the most head scratching were the rock’n’roll strum (in A), the finger picking exercise, and the dreaded chucking! So I’m going to run through each of those for you here, with a copy of the songsheet I provided on the day (along with any corrections that I subsequently noticed), and a helpful little demo video.
#1 Rock’n’Roll Strum (in 'A')
Basic rock’n’roll rhythm is generated by a straight up and down strum pattern 1&2&3&4&, where the numbers are downstrums, and the ‘&’ signs are upstrums.
The magic happens by effectively turning the third strum of every four from an ‘A’ chord to an ‘F#m’ chord. This chord change only happens on those single beats (or half beats). If we take our strum pattern 1&2&3&4& you would turn the 2 and 4 (in bold / italic). These changes turn the strum into a shuffle pattern. You can apply the same musical mathematics to any chord (I’m not going to get into that here) but it just so happens that when you’re playing in the key of ‘A’ it manifests itself as a chord you probably already know, i.e. F#m. Slowing down the tempo makes this pattern sound more bluesy. You only need to apply the technique to the first chord, the ‘A’ to get that familiar beat going.
Quite coincidentally then, in this my 66th blog I’m going to use ‘Route 66’ as my example.
#2 Finger Picking
Just like strumming patterns, there are many different finger picking patterns, but for beginners, I tend to teach this version of ‘Hey There Delilah’ by The Plain White Ts.
The trick to this one is to pick (generally) the root note of the chord with your thumb, and then to pick the top two strings together with your index and middle finger, kind of like a crab pincer. It’s probably easier if I show you a demo. I like this technique as it gives you a finger picking sound without actually having to try and get all your fingers working in some perfect, cascading pattern. You can up the technique by alternating your bass notes by following the TAB at the bottom of the page.
Edit : I'm sorry I've just noticed I failed to amend a mistake on the above songsheet. On the alternate bass strum line shown immediately above those '1' notes against the 'C' chord should be '3', the same as the top line, sorry!
#3 Chucking
I sometimes refer to this as ‘syncopation’...but it’s basically where you add a percussive strum that consists purely of muted or deadened notes. This can be a bit counter intuitive, as most playing up until a certain point usually consists of desperately trying to NOT mute strings. I won’t lie, this technique I find far more effective if you use a pick, but as with all playing, it ultimately doesn’t matter, it’s just up to you getting the sound you want.
In order to mute all the strings for this percussive strum or ‘chuck’ I do a combination of two things. Firstly I relax the pressure (the squeeze) in my fretting hand, but keep my fingers in contact with the strings. This can sometimes be enough if the chord you’re playing involves fretting all of the strings, but obviously many common ukulele chords have open strings too, so I simultaneously hit the outside edge of my strumming hand against the strings, to stop any open strings from ringing out.
Timing is crucial, and it will most likely take a bit of time and practice to ‘chuck’ effectively, but once you can, it’s a really useful technique to have up your sleeve. I’ve used ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ by The Tokens. Notice how I start with an up-strum in this pattern so that I can ‘chuck downwards’ - I know that sounds pretty awful out of context, but my advice would always be, if you can, chuck downwards… chucking upwards is much harder. Leave upchucking to the chucking professionals! ;-) Anyway… see how you go with these, and let me know how you get on, (and don’t forget to subscribe).
Cheers.
Please note that these are my arrangements of these songs for educational purposes. I obviously don't claim any copywrite or ownership of the songs themselves.
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