Ukulele Music

The links below are to printable pdf files of ukulele arrangements I have made of music, mostly popular songs. I have borrowed ideas from many online sources. My arrangements are usually quite easy, although often with just a touch of added colour. Popular songs are typically heavily orchestrated, and arranging the song for playing on a single instrument is both an approximation and a compromise: to what extent should the ukulele chord follow the melody versus providing the harmony, and when the sung line consists of several voices singing in harmony, which chords are the best chords to use? In my view, the least interesting and often the most cumbersome ukulele arrangements are those that attempt to mimic unison singing, a style of arrangement not untypical for accompanying Christmas carols. On the other hand, it can be hard to sing a song accompanied by a ukulele playing only harmonious colour. Therefore arrangement always involves balancing these, and other, factors

It is a matter of regret for me that I have no opportunity to sing songs in (four-part) harmony, as a consequence of which the arrangements below are not separated into parts. Occasionally I include backing parts, and in one song I have divided the song up between men and women, although they still sing only the melody line. What I should really like to do is to write some arrangements that involve different ukulele parts.

Most ukuleles have only four strings, whereas a guitar has six or twelve strings. This gives the guitar a distinct edge when it comes to arrangements of songs. Many songs have already been arranged for a single guitar. However, whilst some ukulele arrangements can work perfectly well based on a guitar arrangement, others simply don't work well at all, and alternative solutions have to be found.

The skin on my fingers is far too fragile for me to be able to strum my ukulele without using a plectrum - otherwise there is soon blood on the strings, which is neither pleasant nor hygienic. Consequently my arrangements rarely involve finger-picking. Rather than use the recommended felt plectrum, with which I find it incredibly difficult to upstrum at speed, I use a soft nylon plectrum. This allows me to play either loudly and quietly, as required, although not with the same sensitivity as a player using their fingers.

I am not a purist, and when I am singing, I have no wish to pretend that I am the original singer. In my view the best covers are performed when the cover singer makes a song their own. The arrangements below, therefore, although similar to what can be found on YouTube, do not mimic existing recordings. By the same token, it would be fine for someone to take any of my arrangements and transform them into new arrangements that work better for them.

Big Yellow Taxi
Joni Mitchel's vocal range can make her songs demanding to sing. This arrangement includes a minor role for backing vocals.

Calling The Sheep Home From Their Pastures
This is a simple piece that I wrote as a practice session warm-up.I continue to use it. The title is derived from my observation that when sheep are called, they move faster and faster the closer they get to where they are going.

Dancing at Whitsun
This poignantly sad folk song about personal loss as a result of the First World War, was written by Austin John Marshall, and is set to a melody associated with a more traditional (1680s) song known, amongst various titles, as The Week Before Easter and The False Bride, and was made famous by the late Tim Hart before forming Steeleye Span.

Dedicated Follower of Fashion
This is the famous Kinks song from the mid-1960s. The Durham Ukulele Group to which I used to belong played this piece exceptionally well. I have intensified the call-and-response aspect by separating the men's and women's voices.

Grandma's Feather Bed
A classic John Denver song that is good for performance.

Honeycomb
A silly rockabilly song from 1957. Easy to play, and has the sophisticated-sounding feature of two key modulations.

Let It Be
Until I settled on this arrangement, I had previously found the song curiously difficult to pitch.

Maggie May
This is the Rod Stewart classic that is simply great fun to play.

Mariachi
This is an exercise piece I wrote to incorporate both different strumming patterns as well as some more chromatic chord progressions. It is not easy to play, and was never intended to be.

Nancy Spain
This is the song made famous by Christy Moore. It is a delightful song that is easy to play and easy to sing.

Take Me Home Country Roads
Whilst I have transposed this popular John Denver song into several different keys, this arrangement is in G, which works best for my voice.

Turn! Turn! Turn!
Mostly my ukulele arrangements simply involve selecting appropriate chords. However, with this song, which appears in different versions anyway, I have also re-arranged the words so that the lyrics achieve some emotional coherence.

Wonderful Tonight
Whilst this is a lovely song, a ukulele demands that it is played rather faster than Eric Clapton's own renditions. Some people do not like the gentle dissonance I have introduced, but I didn't arrange it for them.

World Turned Upside Down
Written by Leon Rosselson, the song was later covered both by Dick Gaughan and by Billy Brag. It tells the story of how, during the turmoil of the middle of the 17th century, a group of people led by Gerard Winstanley squatted on some land and were driven off by soldiers at the request of local landowners.

Martin Herbert, who died on Wednesday 10 December 2014

Martin Herbert was my friend. He died in the early hours of yesterday morning. He died suddenly and unexpectedly. His death is a great shock to everyone who knew him.

Martin was my closest male friend from our University days: we studied at the University of Durham in the mid- to late-1970s. Like me, he was a thoughtful person, which is one of the reasons why we got on so well. We shared a taste in folk music. I talked at length with Martin when I first met the woman who would become my wife, and he attended our Quaker wedding many years later. It was Martin who aroused my interest in the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).

However, unlike me, Martin was a talented amateur artist, and a gifted musician, both abilities that were to prove extremely significant in his life. I was familiar with his artworks while we were still students. Before he left Durham, Martin gave me one of his early, airbrushed acrylic works, the style of which was reminiscent of the work of Roger Dean, whose album covers were popular at the time. The painting has rarely been off a wall in whichever house I have lived in ever since.

Immediately after university, Martin was uncertain of his direction, and worked for a while as a 'theme park' station master at Beamish Museum in County Durham, in full uniform, replete with pocket watch. When I was turned down by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), Martin applied and his application was successful. In my beat up Austin 1300, I drove Martin and his luggage to Cambridge, where the BAS is based, only to discover that we had left a suitcase in Durham, so we had to drive all the way back again the same evening. He worked as a meteorologist in the Antarctic for a couple of years.

At some stage Martin took a well-paid job with a major software company called the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), relocating to High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. During this time, he developed his talents to play every musical instrument (other than a ukulele) one can find in a folk club, and then also started to run the folk club. Martin and at least one of his folk groups (Wynters Armoury?) played at folk festivals such as that at Cambridge. My wife, daughter and I met him in Whitby when he was playing at the folk festival there. He bought a bothy on the North York Moors, but sold it again when he realised how rarely he was able to travel back north. I am unsure how many years he worked for SCO, but at some stage he decided that he'd had enough of all that, had saved enough money, and took himself off round the world for a year, often travelling off the beaten track, collecting ethnic musical instruments, and being taught to play them. On his return, inspired by some indigenous American music and instruments he had encountered (and bought), he played, synthesised, recorded and produced an album of wonderful haunting music that I have listened to a million times: Spirit of the Wood. My cassette tape of the music is nearly worn out, but it can still be found in mp3 format on his website (www.martinherbert.com).

Whilst I am hazy about dates, some while later Martin packed his fiddle and went south to Andalucia (he was familiar with Laurie Lee's book As I walked Out One Midsummer Morning) to live in the house of a friend. There he started to develop much further his abilities in fine art. I think that he was in Spain for a couple of years. From a Pre-Raphaelite interest in naiads and dryads as an amateur artist at university, Martin developed a much more robust new-age kind of spiritual artistic interest and style, combining traditional artistic skills with digital. He launched a website called Spirit Visions, and was able successfully to sell some of his work. Returning to Britain, he moved into a ramshackle house in mid-Wales, and I guess that he was in proximity to like-minded people. He married a Finnish artist, Vivi-Mari Carpelan, who seemed to give him a renewed zest for life. Galleries accepted his work for sale, and he was a serious entrant for national artistic competitions. For a while his weblog incorporated weekly a new artwork. A year or two ago, Martin decided that he would be able to make more headway in the competitive artistic world if he were to have an MA in Fine Art. This autumn he enrolled at Aberystwyth University. His energy and enthusiasm for the degree appeared boundless, and it would seem that his presence was welcomed by staff and students alike.

I consider it possible that Martin may have mellowed in middle-age compared with our student days, when he was a refreshingly uncouth young man from Peterlee, County Durham, although I believe that he was born in Derbyshire. I will never forget an evening in some pub or other, telling how, on a previous occasion, having drunk quite a lot of alcohol, he had vomited and then observed: "I don't remember eating that!" Martin always lived life a little faster and more richly than me. Artist, musician, more-recently a loving husband, a good friend to many, many people, and my most long-standing friend. You will be missed. I shall miss you.

My cultured father

Sunrise at 08:29 this Minimal cloud cover should mean that the south eastern sky will start lightening at about 07:00. Sunset at 15:48 means that the day is two minutes longer than yesterday.

Today is the 75th anniversary of my father's birth. However, he died nearly 19 years ago. I feel sure that he would have lived-to-the-full all the years he was denied by his early and untimely death. He would have continued to rejoice in the natural landscape of his adopted Cornwall. He would have continued to enjoy music, the arts, crafts and the social activities that characterised the final ten or so years of his life, some of which were interests developed from boyhood with the encouragement of his mother, and that in turn he passed on to me. (I remember that he had two vinyl LPs (long-playing records): Tchaikovsky's "1812" and "March Slav" that I got to know well, and a jazz record called "How Hi the Fi" (that I have just checked out as being recorded by Buck Clayton and Woody Herman in 1954) but I cannot remember ever having heard it. I now quite often listen to jazz on BBC Radio 3, along with acres of 'classical' music. I think that my father was quite satisfied about me becoming a 'Prommer' (i.e. attending the Henry Wood / BBC promenade concerts every summer evening for three months, mostly in the Royal Albert Hall in London). I am uncertain about whether he ever attended a Prom concert. However, he took my brother and me to a concert of Harrison Birtwhistle music at the Royal Festival Hall in London sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s, and it is obvious that he was familiar with this concert venue. This was the venue for one of the all-time greatest performances of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, in mid-November 1957, of which I have a recording. It is possible that my father attended the concert..I like to imagine that as a 21 year old young man, recently returned to London winter smogs after National Service in sunny Cyprus, he was trying hard to ignore the coughing and to concentrate on the performance.