Martin C1K sound sample

So I've been gushing about the Martin C1K since I got it in Hawaii last week.  One week into it's ownership, I still think it sounds great.  It's definitely a manly ukulele as it takes well to hard playing.  But up to this point I have not recorded anything using it.  I had a little bit of time today so I shot a video with it playing Jake Shimabukuro's version of Rolling in the Deep by Adele.  I actually learned this one before Don't Stop Believin' as I've been playing it for a few weeks now.  Much like Don't Stop Believin', this one is pretty straight forward.  Come to think of it, a lot of Jake's more recent arrangements are pretty simple.  But to me he has a knack to make them sound really good even though they are technically simple arrangements.  Those of you who want to learn these songs, hopefully my videos present a clear enough view of the fretboard so you can get an idea on how to play them.

I'm not sure how well the sound from this video represent this ukulele in real life.  I think it sounds a lot more impressive in person, but that impressiveness may be difficult to capture on video because it has a lot to do with how powerful it sounds, which could be hard to hear from a video recording.

Anyway, here's Rolling in the Deep played on the Martin C1K:

Glee...

I've never actually watch a second of the show "Glee", and have no idea what it is about.  But after watching a few videos of Jake Shimabukuro playing a cover version of "Don't Stop Believin'", which is supposed to be used on "Glee" as some sort of theme song, on the ukulele and then actually seeing him play it live, I thought it would be a nice arrangement to learn sometime.  A couple of days ago I decided to tackle it and found that it was surprisingly simple and fun to play.  There is this quick picking bridge part that is kind of hard, but otherwise the arrangement required no difficult skills to play.  So it came together pretty quickly and I thought I'd take a video playing it while I was wearing a somewhat Aloha shirt-like shirt today (Har!).

As usual, I can never get through a video mistake-free, and that bridge part is pretty bad, but what the heck.  I think I'll make another video later if I can play it better using another uke as a sound demo or something.  By the way, if you hear some sort of whining sound in the background, that's my dog.  I'm not sure what was up with him.  Maybe he couldn't stand my ukulele playing.  Just ignore it.

The Unknown...

I've been working on learning Kalei Gamiao's The Unknown in the past week after seeing the first of Dominator's tutorial on the song.  I had heard this song before, but didn't pay much attention to it.  Having checked it out again after seeing the tutorial, I thought it was a cool song and decided to try to learn it.  Dominator has posted tutorials on the first two sections so far and they helped a lot getting me off the ground on it.  I was eager to learn the song so I went ahead and tried to learn the rest of it by watching a couple of videos of Kalei playing it, and it came together for me (well, to my ghetto standards anyway) a lot faster than I anticipated.  The key to learning this song is what this particular tutorial called a "Kalei Gamiao Strum".  Using this strum, or fast picking technique, you can get it to sound close to how Kalei plays it.  So in my excitement on learning how to play this song, I wanted to upload a video of it, hence the video that appear on this post.

I guess taking a video of yourself playing the ukulele is a good way to see what needs improvement.  I noticed that I'm a lot worse at the "Kalei Gamiao Strum" than I thought when watching the video, and I could do a better job with the pace of my strumming.  So I hope I can get a better take on playing this sometime later.  But here it is, the patented ghetto attempt on The Unknown by yours truly:

Cowboy is very busy???

This post isn't going to make much sense unless you're either Taiwanese/Chinese or if you are a fan of Jay Chou (周杰倫, the guy who played Cato in the recent Green Hornet movie).

So I was watching some videos on Youtube a couple of nights ago trying to re-learn Ukulolo (still one of my all time favorite uke arrangements), and some of the related videos were made by some people from Taiwan.  So after clicking around some links, I arrived at this instrumental cover of 牛仔很忙, which literally translates to Cowboy Is Very Busy.  I've heard this song many times before, and while I wouldn't come close to counting it as one of my favorite songs, it's so campy and weird it's actually kind of catchy.

So I set out to learn that instrumental version and it turned out to be pretty simple.  Of course, it would take more than a few days to get smooth playing anything, but I tried taking a video of it anyway.  My daughters were near by and decided to join in on the fun by doing silly dances and monkeying around while I played, so I decided to just upload one of  these videos.  The cover is basically just messing around with the ukulele, so I guess a ghetto version is appropriate.

Hey Jude

A few years ago I came across an instrumental cover of the Beatles' Hey Jude by WS64 on Youtube.  I thought it was a great arrangement and later found that someone had tabbed it on the Ukulele Underground forum.  The tabs were not totally complete, but there was enough to help me learn this arrangement.  So I've been playing this on and off for a couple of years now.  It's pretty easy and fun to play, and although I stopped playing it for a while, I recently started playing it again and it came back to me pretty quickly.  I've been meaning to record a video of this song, but haven't really tried to find time to do it until now.

I decided to play it on the Leolani super-soprano I have laying around the couch lately.  This ukulele was the very first ukulele I bought during a trip to Honolulu at the Aloha Stadium flea market.  I probably overpaid for it at $125, and it is the one responsible for starting the UAS madness for me.  I had loaned it out to someone for a couple of years, and last year it was returned to me.  Playing around it over the last couple of months, I was surprised by how nice it sounded to me.  Even when I was an inexperienced beginner, I found other ukes such as a Flea I once owned to be better sounding.  But today, for some reason, this Leolani is actually holding its own even against the solid wood ukes I own.  The fact that it's a laminated ukulele means I can just leave it out all the time, so it's very handy.  I'm glad it has returned to my possession after a couple of years away.

Bring Your What???

Your Adz, that is.  So I have no idea what Adz means and I'm too lazy to google it, but I managed to learn a reasonable facsimile of this song from Jake Shimabukuro's "Peace Love Ukulele" album a few months ago.  The video was recorded a couple of months ago, but I haven't had time (read: lazy) to post it until now.  I'm pretty sure I played the main riff incorrectly, but I haven't tried to learn the correct way.  In fact, I don't think I can play this song all the way through right now because I haven't played it at all lately.  Maybe I should try to re-learn it at a later date.  Perhaps wait until Jake's "Peace Love Ukulele" tab book is released! (I just learned about this tab book today.  Too bad it won't have Blue Roses Falling in it.  I get many messages via Youtube asking for Blue Roses Falling for some reason)

Anyway, here's the video.  I think I've reached my ceiling as an ukulele player as I don't feel like I've improved in the last year or so.  That's OK though.  Considering I'm playing stuff now that I never dreamed that I would be able to play when I started playing the ukulele, I'm happy just being a hack!

Comparing a few concert ukes

Since receiving the Mya-Moe concert ukulele, I've been meaning to do some sort of a demo between it and some other concert ukes I have.  I got some free time this weekend so I decided to make a video playing it and three other ukes: William King ls-concert, Glyph mezzo-soprano, Collings UC-1.

Each of these ukuleles were strung with different kind of strings, so perhaps the comparison isn't as un-bias as it could be.  But I have found that at this level of ukulele, strings don't really change the basic dynamic of their sound anyway.  These ukes pretty much should sound good with any reasonably good strings.  The string setup:

Collings UC-1 (Aquila strings)
William King long-scale concert (Southcoast medium tension)
Glyph mezzo-soprano (Worth CD)
Mya-Moe concert (Worth CM)

Besides sharing the same scale length (the King is 1" longer than the rest), all of these ukes have radiused fretboards.  The Collings have a 1-3/8" nut while the other three have 1.5" nuts.  The string spacing are also all different, with the Mya-Moe being the widest followed by Glyph, King, and Collings.  This made it slightly challenging to quickly play the same things on these ukes in succession, as you will see a few mess ups and messy playing on the video.  But I think it gets the point across.

I won't make any comments on what I personally thought about the sound of each of these ukes, so you can form your own opinion.  I'm actually not sure if this exercise is of any benefit to anyone, but I guess it could just be a fun excuse to post a video featuring four different ukes or something.

Anyway, here's the vid:

Bohemian Rhapsody on the Mya-Moe

I've been playing Bohemian a lot in the last month or so, in hopes of being able to play it better than I did when I posted a video of this song a couple of months ago. I definitely feel like I've improved (I mean, I better be after practicing for two months right?), but it's still a work in progress. Then again, I'm not sure I can play any song cleanly, especially in front of a camera. With the arrival of my Mya-Moe concert, I thought I'd post a couple of videos up with it, and Bohemian Rhapsody is the first one.

Bohemian Rhapsody played badly...

....but hey, at least I played it!

Anyway, Bohemian Rhapsody is a song that was very familiar to me. When I was in junior high, I watched MTV all the time because I loved watching music videos. Back then they have these video countdown show and when the movie Wayne's World used Bohemian Rhapsody on the soundtrack, they released a video of the some with footage from Wayne's World mixed in with Queen's original video. It was a hit and was played over and over on MTV back then. It wasn't really one of my favorite songs but I always thought the middle part where they sang a pseudo opera was pretty funny. For some reason even though this song wasn't exactly one of my favorite songs, it was imprinted onto my brain pretty good. I think I can literally recite all the lyrics in the opera section. Which tells me I might have watched too much MTV back then...whatever.

Now Jake Shimabukuro has composed a version of this song on the ukulele, I have taken interest in this song again. After all these years, I still know exactly how this song goes. So it's pretty amazing to hear how closely Jake's version follows the original. That's a good thing when trying to learn this song because it is really long at almost six minutes. If I didn't know exactly how the song sounded like, I probably would have no shot at learning it.

As usual, I searched Youtube for videos to learn this song from. There are a few videos of Jake himself playing this song, but I did most of the learning from this video by Greyboy78. That's because he played it quite a bit slower than Jake and it was easier to follow. His camera angle made it a bit hard to see finger positions, but I was able to figure most it out by ear after seeing the approximate finger positioning on the fingerboard. It turned out that this song really isn't difficult from a technical sense. There are really no really difficult parts to play, but the difficulty lied in the sheer length of the song. As I mentioned, I knew how this song is supposed to sound like, so it helped me remember how to play it, but it definitely wasn't easy to remember how to play through this song from the beginning to the end.

The video I'm posting today is not a very good attempt, as it contains more mistakes then even by my low standards. But I am pretty excited that I can even play through this song entirely at all, so I thought I'd post an attempt. Hopefully I can play it better in the near future and be able to upload a better video.

So here it is, a ghetto attempt at Bohemian Rhapsody:

Hallelujah

Maybe it was the fact that the start date for my Mya Moe concert is approaching soon, but maybe a couple of weeks ago I felt a jolt of motivation to learn some new songs on the ukulele (kind of bad to have UAS as a source of motivation to learn new stuff. Gotta change that...). Having been listening to Jake Shimabukuro's Peace Love Ukulele quite a bit lately, it's only natural that I wanted to learn some of the new stuff from the album. Bohemian Rhapsody has always been on my wish list to learn, but I have not really gave it a shot until just a few days ago because it seems too difficult (trying to piece it together now, realizing that the difficulty is not in the technical aspect, but rather how long the song is). So I tackled Bring Your Adz. This song seemed to be manageable for my playing level but while I was able to learn it fairly quickly, I still have a long ways to go before I can play it smoothly enough. While browsing Youtube videos to learn Adz (my primary way of learning new songs these days), I saw a related Hallelujah (Jake's version) video. I viewed a couple of those and decided to try and learn it. To my pleasant surprise it was pretty easy and I was able to play it reasonably well in a few days. I had some time on my hands yesterday so I decided to shoot a video of this song. As far as number of takes go to get a presentable video, it wasn't too bad. So here is Hallelujah.

Pocket Uke craziness

I promised trying crazy stuff on the Kala Pocket Uke, and here is the first attempt. I've become somewhat of a Mach 4 junkie and have been playing it all the time, so I thought I'd try it on the Pocket uke! If you watch the video below, you'll probably agree that it ain't a pretty sight. But hey, I tried. No, the Pocket Uke definitely is not suited to play solo arrangements, but it is fun to try, even if I look and sound bad doing it. :p

Without further ado, here is Mach 4 on the Kala Pocket ukulele. Don't say I didn't warn you...

143 means I Love You...

Jake Shimabukuro is in town for a concert tonight (The Cedar in Minneapolis) for the 4th time in the last 3 years. That's almost mind boggling when I think about it. The Twin Cities isn't exactly a hotbed for ukulele yet each time I went, the shows were sold out. Sure, the show at the 1500 seat Ordway a couple of years ago wasn't actually sold out, but considering there was a big snow storm that night, the turn out was pretty phenomenal. I think during the last time he was here, he mentioned that his manager has some ties to the Twin Cities, so I guess that explains why he has been here relatively frequently.

Anyway, I wasn't able to go this time, as I didn't find out about it until fairly late (although that was a couple of months ago) and decided against making arrangements to go. The three shows I've been to by and large were the same. I never did get to see Jake play Going to California or Thriller, which I wish he would have played, but I did enjoy the show each time. I bet he will play some songs I have not heard him play live this time. Maybe even Bohemian Rhapsody. Oh well. Hopefully he has a few more trips here in the future and I can catch another show.

Oh yeah, I guess I should get to the title of this post. I had some time alone with my baby son tonight at home, and I had been planning to take a video of me playing 143, so I tried playing it while holding the baby. He is almost 6 months old now and he has been a pretty good little boy so far. I did about 3 takes playing this song and he was pretty good sitting through them. You definitely can't do that while playing a guitar! LOL!



143 is a very simple song. The fact that I can actually play it halfway decently while holding a baby kind of proves it. It might be the easiest Jake Shimabukuro song I've tried to learn. I'll throw out some of the fingering for this if you are interested in learning. The only difficult part has to do with the opening "chorus", where your middle finger has to do a pretty severe bend to hit the A-string. My hand actually hurts after playing this song, so that's no joke!

Anyway, the chorus goes something like this (it would probably make more sense if you sound out the stuff I'm writing below and compare with the video above):

Strum
2400

Alternate strumming between
2400
2404
2404
2400
2405
2405

and

2400
2404
2404
2400
2402 (This hurts!)
2402

Then it's:

Alternate strumming between

2200
2204
2204
2200
2205
2205

and

2200
2204
2204
2200
2202
2202

strum
4220
4222
slide up to
6444
back to 4222

Picking part:

Out of this chord

2240

Pick in this string order
C, E, G, A, G, E, C

Then out of this chord

1120

Pick in this string order
C, E, G, A, G, E, C

Then these three chords picked in the same string order as above
2240
4440
6654

The "interlude":

strum
6400
4300
3200
2100

On the way back to 6400
strum

4200

The "ending":

a) strum
2100
4200
6400

b) then strum
6400
7600
9800

c) then strum
11-900
9800
7600

d) then strum
9800
7600
6400

Repeat

At the very last run through the ending, after part c):

strum
11-900
13-11-00
14-13-00

That's pretty much the entire song. I don't know if the above makes any sense. If not, please leave me a comment here if you have any questions.

Kiss From a Rose cover

As mentioned previously on this blog, I've been digging a couple of Kalei Gamiao's ukulele arrangements. I started trying to learn his version of Kiss From a Rose but ended up getting Mach 4 down first. After taking the Mach 4 video yesterday, I practiced Kiss From a Rose a bit tonight and did a few takes with the camcorder. I got a take I thought was decent so it was uploaded.

Unlike Mach 4, there really aren't any parts that are technically difficult in this song, but overall I think it's a little harder to play. Maybe because there are more parts in this song, but it took me longer to memorize how it goes.

I decided to play this using the William King LS-concert because I have not been giving it much love lately and because there's a pull-off at the 15th fret that was kind of hard to execute on the Glyph mezzo-soprano. While playing this ukulele during the 4 or 5 takes for this video, I was reminded how great this ukulele sounds. The notes really ring out when you play it and the sustain is very nice. While I have to admit I'm currently more partial to the type of sound coming out of the Glyph, the King LS-concert is still great and doesn't really take a backseat to any ukulele as far as sound quality is concerned.

Anyway, here's the video. I hope you find it to be decent.

Mach 4 cover

OK, so since I figured out how to play Mach 4, I've been playing it whenever I'm playing my ukuleles. So after posting Mach 3 a couple of days ago, I tried a few takes playing the whole thing. Since I don't think I've ever been able to make a video playing mistake-free ukulele, I thought a couple of the takes were passable so I uploaded one. This is without a doubt one of the most enjoyable songs I've ever played on the ukulele, and it's not really that difficult once you know how to play it (of course, if you're aiming to play exactly like Kalei, then it's pretty friggin' difficult/impossible). I find it strangely relaxing to play despite the speed it's supposed to be played.

Anyway, here it is.

Mach 3...because it's not quite Mach 4...

Since I found the Kalei Gamiao video Mach 4 (posted right below this post) last week, I've been working hard at learning it. When I first saw it I thought there's no way I could play it. It seemed like a song that's totally over my head and beyond my playing abilities. Still, I attempted playing the rather challenging looking and sounding intro and after a couple of days of noodling around with it, I actually could play a decent facsimile of that intro part. So I watched the video more intensely and figured out how to play it for the most part. I'm by no means any good at it yet, as there are a couple of sections that are really challenging and totally kicks my butt (as you can obviously see). But I'm pretty psyched that I'm even on my way to learning this one, so I've made a video of it. Since it's mistake filled and not very smooth yet, it's not quite Mach 4, so I present to you its ghetto brother, Mach 3:



And by the way, the ukulele in the video is the Glyph mezzo-soprano. I'm really loving this ukulele right now. It's got such a crisp and thumping sound and I'm finding myself liking the matte French Polished finish a lot more than I thought I would. With apologies to luthiers who made some of the other fine ukuleles in my collection, I must say right now the Glyph mezzo-soprano is my favorite.

Trapped!

One of the songs I've been learning in recent months was Jake Shimabukuro's Trapped. (Yes, I realize the instrument I'm playing is called the uke, not the jake, but I guess I'm a fanboy...) This is the first song on his Live album and I've heard it at his concert twice. I think he explained that it's some sort of an Egyptian beat that kind of goes like 1,2-1,2,3, 1,2-1,2,3 or something like that. It's pretty catchy and I've always liked it. It's a very short song and didn't sound too difficult so I tried to play it based on how it sounded to me. I was able to figure out something that sounded pretty close by playing the first passage this way:

GCEA
x4x2
x4x0
x43x
x42x

where I pluck the 2 strings using my thumb and index finger. However, a while later I decided to pay closer attention to the song and noticed that toward the end it didn't quite sound the same as the way I played it. So I looked up a few Youtube videos and upon examination it looked like Jake was playing the song out of a completely different position as I've been playing it. So I tried to mimic it and ended up playing the first passage this way:

I:
x47x
x45x
x43x
x42x

This is played with my index and middle fingers plucking the 2 strings and the thumb picking C-4 after the x47x chord. Playing it this way made the whole song sound more like what the CD sounded like. The rest of the progression look like this:

II:
x57x
x58x
xx57
xx55
x57x
x58
x55x
x57x

III:
x47x
x45x
x43x
x42x
x47x
x48x
x45x
x47x

IV:
x37x
x35x
x33x
x32x
x37x
x38x
x35x
x37x

V:
x00x
x02x
x03x
x05x

VI:
x22x
x23x
x25x
x27x

strum
2322
2323

That's basically everything except for the ending, which was the main difference between how I originally played this and how I play it now:

x47x
x45x
x23x
x22x

x22x
x23x
three times

x00x
xx3x (hammer on)
x00x

x22x
xx5x
x22x

x23x
slide to x47x

strum 0477

Anyway, I don't know if any of the above make any sense, but if you want to give this song a shot, it might help. Below is a video of an attempt at this song.

Glyph mezzo soprano sound sample (Hula Girl)

NatoUkulele on Youtube is a very talented ukulele player. Not too long ago I saw a video of his arrangement of Jake Shimabukuro's "Hula Girl" and thought it was pretty cool. I really liked the original song, but because it's meant to be played with backing music and percussion, I had not played the song much on my own. NatoUkulele's arrangement of it is a solo version and soon after seeing it I tried to learn it from watching his video. It's a bit of a hand twister in spots and as with most songs I learn I have not been able to consistently play it smoothly. However it's quite short so I could at least play it through reasonably. I took a video of it played with the new Glyph mezzo soprano using an HD video camera so you can see my screw ups more clearly. The Glyph has sounded good to my ears since I've gotten it, and I think the sound from the video is a reasonable representation of its sound.

Cognito Town

While I was in Oahu at the beginning of March, I took a ukulele lesson with Bruce Shimabukuro. He taught me a song called Cognito Town. He went over the main picking parts and the chords with me during the lesson. I thought it was a pretty easy song to learn and picked it up within the one hour lesson. Later during that trip I decided to buy Bruce's album called Incognito that had this song. When I heard it from his actual album, I realized that he taught me the song at about a quarter of the speed he played it on the CD. It also had some drums and bass parts too. I decided to try and learn it at the speed it was played on the CD and also the few extra parts Bruce didn't cover during the lesson. The end result is what you see below.

For this video, I played the chords on the Ko'olau CE-1 and recorded it using Audacity. I then played it back on the laptop speaker during the video and played the picking parts over those chords. To be honest the sound quality coming out of the speakers was pretty crappy and while I picked the melody, I thought it didn't sound too hot. But I think after it's picked up by the camera's microphone combined with the picking, it actually sounded like an OK approximation of the song on the video. I think. But hey, you don't get to learn a song from the guy who wrote it very often right?

Anyway, I think Bruce's CD is pretty good, and if you want to check out Cognito Town with the full ensemble with bass and drums, be sure to track down a copy of Incognito.

Playing ukulele by the ocean

I mentioned in a recent post that I took a video of me playing the ukulele on a balcony by the beach in Oahu. The video is now uploaded. To me, playing the ukulele in Hawaii is simply something that must be done when I visit the islands. I'm very glad that I have taken the King LS-concert along for the trip and it served me well. I'm not sure when I'll be visiting Hawaii again, but whenever that may be, a ukulele will definitely come along for the ride.

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...