Five Dollars Unleaded??? I wish...

Well, I guess it's been a while since you could actually move a vehicle with five dollars worth of unleaded gasoline, but that didn't stop Jake Shimabukuro from writing "Five Dollars Unleaded". I think he said this was a song written about when he was a kid and his dad would go to the gas station and tell the attendant to put in "five dollars unleaded" in his car. Needless to say, it's now about $50 unleaded to fill most cars and a lot more for trucks and SUV's. But anyway...

So a couple of months ago I watched a few videos of this song on Youtube, including this fine cover, and decided that I would like to learn it. Since there are no tabs available to my knowledge, I thought I'd try to learn it from Youtube videos. Besides that cover, I found a few videos of Jake playing this song. Between watching the videos and listening to the notes, I think I was able to play a reasonable version of this song, and here is the result. This is a fairly easy song to play, but there are a couple of finger stretcher parts, including a note that reached the 18th fret. I discovered that both of my sopranos do not have an 18th fret while trying to play this on them. The ending passage was also a bit of a challenge, since it has to be played pretty fast. Otherwise I didn't find it overly difficult to learn. That's one thing about most of Jake's songs. They seem pretty hard to play but if you really give it a good shot, they are not too bad. Of course, 3rd Stream is still extremely difficult no matter how I slice it...