Core Ukulele Skills: 5 Songs to Start Your Journey
Easy songs with TABs and chords
4,7 / 5,0 | 
Core Ukulele Skills - 5 Songs to Start Your Journey · Source: Raul Valcarcel / Alamy Stock Photo
These ukulele skills set the foundations for your future playing. Why not check out these well-known songs to kick-start your ukulele adventure?
Key Information about Ukulele Skills
- As a beginner, it’s important to get a good understanding of what’s required to play your new instrument.
- Take the time to understand how to read ukulele TABs, chord diagrams and basic rhythms.
- Most important of all, have fun and enjoy while you’re learning. That’s why it’s great to play songs that we all know and love.
Easy Ukulele Songs
Core Ukulele Skills: What do you need to know?
The ukulele is a fantastic instrument to learn. Whether you’re a child or an adult, it doesn’t require the same effort and investment as other instruments.
Working across just four strings, the ukulele fits between your arms and doesn’t take up much space in your home or studio. Unlike guitar or bass, there are fewer skills and techniques to learn, allowing virtually instant access to becoming a pro.
However, there are still some key skills you’ll need. Here, we’ll be looking at using TABs and chord diagrams. Both of these are your ticket to playing and understanding the ukulele.
Stand By Me – Ben E. King
Our first ukulele skills are going to come from this classic hit. Learning recognisable songs always helps with your playing. Chances are, you’ll know how the song needs to sound, plus, it’ll impress your friends and family when you show them what you can play.
Here, we’ve got the TAB for the main melody and bass line of the song. If you’ve never used it before, TAB is short for tablature and is a lines and numbers system. The lines working across refer to the strings on the ukulele, and the numbers relate to the frets. Each fret is numbered.
Therefore, if you were to see a number 3 on the line at the bottom, you’d play that fret on the G string. Luckily for us, this piece only needs a couple of notes. Once you get the hang of it, you can repeat this throughout the whole song, making it a great beginner piece to perfect your core ukulele skills.
Somewhere Over The Rainbow – Israel Kamakawiwo’ole
Next up, it’s time to add some chords into the mix. Stand By Me was great to get some initial single-note skills under our fingers, whereas chord playing will take you further.
Somewhere Over The Rainbow is arguably one of the most recognisable ukulele songs out there. You can already hear the palm trees swaying in the wind.
This song features some key chords when it comes to your ukulele skills. Moreover, there are a couple of lesser spotted ones, such as Bb and Dm. One other thing to note here is the repeat markers, which appear at the start and the end of each bar. Via TAB, they tell us to repeat certain bars. Unless stated otherwise by a number, you repeat the bar twice by default.
Zombie – The Cranberries
Another karaoke classic here. Zombie allows us to expand on our ukulele skills by playing four chords throughout the entire song.
Yes, that’s right! All we need to master this Cranberries tune is four chords. Em, C, G and D are who we’ll be working with. Rather than using TAB to show us how to play these chords, we’ve got some chord diagrams.
Chord diagrams give us a bird ‘s-eye view of the fretboard. Each vertical line represents a string, and the horizontal lines are our frets. Look closely at the black dots; these show us where to put our fingers on the strings.
This time, we’ll want to play four downstrokes on each chord. Or if that’s too fast, just play one downstroke each, with three rests between the chords.
When you’re feeling more confident, we can progress to double time. This involves playing across the beats 1+ 2+ 3+ 4+. Or, down up, down up, down up, down up.
Runaround Sue – Dion
Similarly, let’s use a couple of easy chords to fulfil most of one song. I love this ’60s classic; it just makes you want to get up and dance! Plus, maybe this is one for the older learner.
Unlike Zombie, where we can use the same four chords for the entire song, this changes a few times. The verse and choruses are the same, whereas the bridge sections switch things up a little bit.
This is, therefore, a great song to learn about song structures when looking at your core ukulele skills. It’ll help you to listen out for subtle differences in the score. Definatley a good one to learn!
What should you watch out for when learning Runaround Sue? Just be mindful that in the verse and chorus sections, we play two bars on each chord, instead of one. This translates to 8 beats on each chord. However, it switches to just one bar each in the bridge.
Riptide – Vance Joy
To conclude our look at tracks to help with ukulele skills, we’ve got this 2010s pop anthem. This track is all ukulele, and is one of those right-of-passage songs.
Chord-wise, it’s fairly easy. Just three chords across the whole song. Nice! Although this one can get tricky when you start looking at the strumming pattern.
This is a quick track, not helped by the down-down, up-down-up strumming pattern. This helps to make your playing sound more like the original track.
Relevant Gear
If you’re at the start of your ukulele playing journey, then you might need some basic materials to get you started. From your actual instrument to various accessories. All available from *Thomann:
Core Ukulele Skills: Getting the ball rolling
With these tracks, you should be able to start learning your new instrument. Working across chords and TAB, you’ll gain the confidence to play bigger and better songs as you improve.
Videos
Further Information:
*This post contains affiliate links and/or widgets. When you buy a product via our affiliate partner, we receive a small commission that helps support what we do. Don’t worry, you pay the same price. Thanks for your support!
This might also interest you
