Hello everybody on HIVE and especially those of the Music Community! I am writing to you from Cape Town, South Africa. The two hobbies I tend to post the most about on HIVE are my music and song writing (usually performed these days with fellow HIVER @clairemobey – please follow her!) … and surfing.
Now usually when I get up on stage to play my/our own music or some covers, my main instruments are guitar (maybe with some pedals?), vocals, harmonica (played simultaneously on a rack) and, more recently, a stomp-box.
However, if that’s not enough variety for you… I do love to mess around at home with other interesting sounds on whatever zany instrument I can find… (or even make!) Because of this, I thought I would make a series of posts where I share live performances on more unusual instruments. Today I would like to post again on this topic:
PART 4 – My baby daughter’s Ukulele tuned to Open C
Now there’s nothing too unusual about a ukulele… they seem to be very popular in the last few years. However, it is quite rare to see a ukulele that’s not in standard tuning…
What is ukulele standard tuning? Well, imagine you are a guitar player and you put a capo on the 5th fret, and could only play the bottom 4 strings… You would be left with G C E A, correct? Now imagine that the G-string (yeah yeah 😊) is actually as thin a string as the A-string, and is actually tuned up an entire octave to the next G, just two semi-tones lower than the highest A itself! Well, that version called g C E A is the standard tuning for a ukulele, unless it is something like a “baritone ukulele” which is a ridiculous oxymoron in my mind anyway! Hahaha!
This means that picking up a ukulele and playing it semi-decently is pretty easy if you already know guitar – the chord shapes are the same with the top two strings missing, and that higher g gives it that characteristic overall high-pitched happy sound!
So, seeing as there are only 4 strings and I already have four fingers, why would I ever tune it differently to make it easier?
Well… it’s not actually my ukulele. It was my daughter’s birthday present. She just turned 1 year old!
The ukulele actually belongs to my baby daughter – it was a first birthday present. Isn’t she cute?
As my baby daughter was getting older and starting to approach her first birthday, I noticed that she seemed to prefer noisy musical toys like rattles and tambourines. She had already learnt how to blow on a tin-whistle or recorder. She seemed to understand a piano, and that pressing different keys made different notes. She also became very interested in my guitar and would reach over to strum it…
So obviously I thought she would enjoy her own mini-guitar – hence a bright, colourful ukulele! But dear reader, as clever as she is for a baby… she is still a baby for now! All she can do, just yet, is reach over and brush the strings, which would sound pretty awful if I hadn’t tuned the thing to an open chord!
So, I looked at g C E A again, and realized that if the highest A was a repeat of the g, then I would have g C E G, which is an open C-major chord – so now, when she reaches over and strums the open strings with one hand, it sounds pleasant!
But it means I had to quickly teach myself the other chords, for that tuning, for when I picked it up (I mean, I was always going to play it too, wasn’t I?). For example, the main four chords are:
Cmaj: 0000 (g C E g)
Amin: 2002 (a C E A)
Fmaj: 2012 (a C F A)
G*: 0230 (g D G G!) or Gmaj: 0 2 3 4 (g D G B)
From there, it’s fun to mess around and see which songs sound good or at least interesting with the high-pitched, lilting style of a ukulele behind them, rather than a normal guitar. Here’s my ukulele take on an absolute classic of a 1950s protest song by Pete Seeger: Where Have all the Flowers Gone?
