My daughter has been playing the ukulele for a couple of years now through school classes, and she’s getting pretty good at it. And as all parents can appreciate, it’s a big bonus that she actually likes playing it. Win-win.
When the order for household isolation came down, the school was pretty quick to offer loaning extra ukuleles to anyone who’d be interested in one. We jumped on board and in short order, uke #2 showed up on our doorstep.
In typical new student fashion, I didn’t have much patience for learning the notes and scales and chords that my daughter was trying to show me, I wanted to get right to playing the thing for real. I had no delusions of being the Eddie Van Halen of ukuleles, but being able to just get to playing some recognizable songs modestly well would be great.
With a little trial and error, I was fast to discover some chords for myself (hey, look at that: They do come in handy!), and with some wrong turns playing by ear, was able to get to them bang-on for the Iron & Wine version of Such Great Heights, which is a great song (and which I’ll take over the original any day. Sorry, The Postal Service). It’s not the individual notes like Sam does on the guitar, but the underlying three main chords that work through the whole song, which I can whistle along with pretty damn well.
I’m hoping to record it on a new phone app I got–which is fancy enough that it even lets you lay down overlapping tracks, though that won’t be needed here unless I opt to do some of the harmony he sings with himself in the song–but if there’s one thing you can say about being isolated in a small house with a grade-school student and a wife who’s a teacher, both of whom are doing video class meets, it’s that it’s not often quiet. So the recording may have to wait.
Even before we got the second uke, I was using the same phone app with my daughter’s instrument to try to get the different layers down for Pachelbel’s Canon In D, which I’ve loved for decades (enough so that in high school, I sought out buying the sheet music for it myself to bring into school so our string class could play it; it didn’t pan out, but that’s another story). The problem there is that I’m not so familiar with each separate part for the song that I can a) figure out all of each one by ear, let alone b) well enough that I can lay down a track for it. So that’ll be a project to work toward.
Next up was my wife wanting to do a project using Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds. So again, a little plonking later, and I had that tune down on the ukulele. Not sure that’ll be something I’d want to record, but it was fun to figure out and then play along with.
For the next thing I want to figure out and get down well, I’m thinking of either The Girl or Sleeping Sickness by City and Colour. Both great songs.
All of this would be made much more simple if I could just find the tabs for these songs online (which is how I approach playing anything on the guitar), but unfortunately these ukuleles have what’s evidently called “Canadian tuning”, which is apparently a thing. It’s also called D tuning, I’m informed. Which makes no sense to me because I believe the second-lowest string is a D, but I guess never let something like that get in the way of you naming your different tuning whatever you want. Hell, for all I know, harp tuning is named after the 11th string from the top. I mean, why not?
In any case, if it weren’t obvious enough, Canadian/D(?) tuning isn’t easy to find in video lessons or tabs. Oh, there’s plenty of uke lessons and tabs out there for more broadly used tuning–I guess for those who aren’t looking for a challenge in seeking out what they want and are a-okay with just being able to find exactly the right thing with minimal effort–but for these Canadian-tuned bad boys, not so much.
And so, playing by ear will likely be the order of the day for some time.
Here’s hoping I can hack around with it often and long enough, and get enough recorded even roughly as a reminder to myself, that whenever some semblance of “normal” returns to the world again and we can all get some time away from each other, I’ll be able to get some at least moderately decent recording done in what will finally be a quieter house. Perhaps even good enough that I’d be okay sharing it, because, dammit, the world could use more middle-aged guys playing folk songs on the ukulele passably and whistling while they do it.
Fingers crossed.