Tuesday 21 September 2010

Beatles on the ukulele

It is no secret that my favourite instrument is the ukulele, and The Beatles is obviously my favourite band, so combining these two was pretty sweet for me.


For a little kind of brief history lesson, Harrison was a good ukulele player and he loved to play the uke. He and Paul used to jam together, and Paul played Harrison's Something on the ukulele, Harrison wasn't impressed (according to McCartney), but McCartney thought it sounded pretty good.


George passed away in 2001 (All things must pass, eh?), and on the one year anniversary of his death day there was this memorial concert, in Alberts Hall, called Concert For George. During this concert Paul McCartney took the stage with his ukulele, which he had gotten from George, and played Something.
Paul is, later in the song, joined by Marc Mann, Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr's drums eventually.


Something and Paul's ukulele has been a successful part of Paul's live shows in the past few years, and I think this is some of the reason for the rise in popularity which the ukulele has gotten in the last couple of years.


                           "I want you to play the ukulele!"

Anyway, the point of this post is to give you a good start, if you are considering to play the ukulele or in particular playing some Beatlish on your ukulele.

For some pretty basic stuff you should visit: 
http://www.youtube.com/user/yourukesage

This channel is basically ukulele lesson for the very beginner, really helpful lessons, nicely explained, and the guy has a pretty cool e-book about ukulele and basic music theory, which is worth checking out as well.

For Beatles ukulele tutorials you should visit:
http://www.youtube.com/user/BeatlesUkuleleMike

Most likely THE best channel on youtube for Beatles songs for the ukulele. You can see the chords, the lyrics and it will be told, most of the time at least, which strum-pattern is the recommended. 
While you are there, you might as well check out Mike's other channels, some of the best ukulele tutorials you will find :)


My last site is awesome and annoying at the same time:
http://beatlesite.info/


It is a site which contains the chords for around 60 Beatles songs. The site shows a ukulele and shows you how to take the chords, in real time! Which is awesome. The non-awesome thing, is that you cannot view the full chord diagram for the whole song, which can be pretty annoying at times :)
Nice site anyhow, most definitely worth checking out.


As the grand finale of this post, here's Paul McCartney on his ukulele at the memorial concert:





Cheers!

12 comments:

  1. love the beatles and this blog. keep up the good work!

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  2. I love ukuleles xD I'm trying to buy one myself :D but bah financial problems >.<

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  3. This blog has quite the following!

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  4. Funny considering I was playing a ukelele at my girlfriends house before.

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  5. Love the blog dudeee. Daily support. BEATLES RULE. Ringo sucks though.

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  6. Nice blog man i'll keep up to date with it!

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  7. Whan an interesting instrument! I feel like ukulele now.

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  8. lol the ukulele are awesome

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  9. That's awesome! Thank you :D

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  10. Interesting read though not a big fan of the the whole ukulele, There original stuff is good though

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