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@charles605 The time signature is missing, but from what’s written in the measure it appears to be 3/4 time. Also the key signature indicates G major (or E minor). The first quarter note is a double stop consisting of A and C. That’s E string 5th fret (ring finger) and A string 3rd fret (index finger), plucked simultaneously. Then a quarter pause. The third quarter is broken down into two eights, A and B. You need a low G in order to play this as written. It’s G string 2nd fret (index finger), followed by G string 4th fret (ring finger). The count is one (pluck E and A strings) – two (pause) – three (pluck G string) – and (pluck G string).
Tab should look somewhat like below. Hope this helps.3——–pause——x——x
5——–pause——x——x
x——–pause——x——x
x——–pause——2——4
Count: One Two Three andOne week into learning St. James Infirmary, an immortal classic I will most likely revisit for a lifetime to come, and learn something new every time I do.
I would love to see a continuation of the scales and modes explained live lessons. The first two lessons were excellent and laid the theoretical ground work by explaining what scales and modes are and how they are related. But that screams for a follow up that teaches how to apply this in real life. How do you find the right scales for any given chord porgression, and how do you use the scales to build a solo over the chord progression, etc. You could make a whole course out of this.
Also I like the idea about advanced percussion techniques a lot.
Finally, I loved the three band arrangements that came out this year (Jump, Jailhouse Rock, Motown Medley), and I’d love to see at least as many again next year. Learning and playing an intricate ukulele arrangement along with a backing track really is what takes your playing to the next level, besides being tons of fun.
I AM A PREMIUM MEMBER
While I usually like to pick the most challenging arrangement to learn for the monthly challenges, I deviated from that rule this time and learned the arrangement that was musically the most appealing to me, which was by far My Favorite Things. For the same reason Andrew mentioned, I just love those unique chord voicings Christopher came up with. Especially the many open voicings give it a very special, almost ethereal sound.
BTW, for thirteen minutes and forty six seconds of pure bliss, please check out the epic John Coltrane version of this tune on youtue.I am a premium member, and I tackled the Motown medley this month. Disclaimer: I started working on it right when it came out, so I had a head start 🙂 Super fun to play along with the backing track, and also very much needed practice for me to learn how to listen to other instruments while playing and trying to stay in sync with them, something I don’t get to do often enough. This was also my very first attempt at recording my playing seperately and mixing it together with the backing track on the computer, so I developed my tech skills as well 🙂
Due to the length of the arrangement I just did a couple of takes instead of trying to shoot for perfection, so there are some rough spots, especially in the last song, I’m not really happy with that yet. I’ll keep practicing it, but it will have to do for this month’s challenge.
Thanks to Evan for the arrangement, to Andrew for the great tutorial and to the band for the backing track. This is the good stuff.Thanks guys!
@rebeca: As all things, that too comes with practice. Jazz is my favorite musical style, so most of the ukulele pieces I learn outside of the rockclass101 challenges are arrangements of jazz standards. And while some of these chord shapes are challenging, the nice thing is that there are just a few of them, and they repeat all over again in pretty much every jazz standard. One of the first pieces I learned was Sweet Sue, Just You from the James Hill book Duets for One, and that one song contains pretty much all of the basic jazz chord shapes. After I had that one down, everything after that was so much easier, since it’s the same shapes all over again, just in different sequences and positions.@rickey: Thanks so much for posting the original! I was tempted to post it myself, but I didn’t want to spam you guys. But if you’ve got just two minutes to spare, don’t liste to my version, please listen to the Les Paul & Mary Ford original. That recording is such a treasure! I can’t stop being amazed all over again by the sheer amount of creativity and innovation packed into these two minutes of magic. In terms of guitar and vocal playing and recording technique, this is not years, it is decades ahead of its time. Can’t believe this was recorded back in 1951. Also, I would recommend to check out the youtube video “playing like Les Paul ain’t no joke” by Guitar Pilgrim, where he breaks down the guitar techniques in this exact video. Very relevating. Finally, check out the video “Mary Ford & Les Paul Absolutley live.” You’ll see that Mary Ford was not just a great singer, but also a bad-ass guitar player. And the ending is just hysterical.
@rebeca yes, but I’ve also been practicing my a.. off over the course of the last year… Anyway, one thing I noticed in your recording is the right hand position, which is closer to the neck for a much sweeter sound. And this time I can’t blame the Uke for the sound difference 😉 I never paid much attention to my right hand position, but definitely will going forward.
@rebeca: pure magic. It doesn’t get any better than that. If that’s how you play after a one year hiatus and with little practice, I have to admit I’m jealous 😉
I AM A PREMIUM MEMBER
Blue Moon – with a little bit of goofing around during the outro in honor of this month’s theme – just couldn’t resist 🙂
I’d like to add that even if it’s not possible or too complicated to add an option to switch between alphabetical order and posting date in the song list, it might be worth considering to change the default (and only available) sort order from alphabetical to posting date, always showing the newest song lessons at the top of the page. I would highly prefer that order, and I can imagine a majority of the users might do as well.
This is actually something I’ve also been looking for, and while the current solution (navigating to a specifc song lesson in order to see the list of the five most recent song lessons) does work, it’s not as intuitive and user friendly as it could be and might be worth being considered as optimization area when the next opportunity for a remake comes up.
My particular suggestion: when navigating to the Ukulele Songs area, by default i see the list of all songs (currently 293) in alphabetical order, spread across 20 pages.
A simple setting that would allow me to change the order from aphabetical to posting date (newest to oldest) would be ideal.
Another setting that would allow me to see all entries on one long page instead of across 20 pages would be even better yet. That would also allow me to use the standard browser search functionality and would be a great addition to the very useful filter and search area on the right.
