Ukulele chord melody sounds great, but what’s next?

You love the sound of hearing both melody and chords at the same time. And the sound of fingerpicking the strings. It sounds like a classical guitar but with the ease and comfort of the smaller ukulele. So, are the Ukulele Sisters going to write some playable chord melodies for you to learn?

You want music that isn’t too hard to play. You don’t want to shift your left hand up and down the neck of the ukulele a lot. You’d prefer music lower than the 8th fret. You don’t want a lot of barre chords. And you want instruction on what to do with your right hand. Can the Ukulele Sisters provide this kind of music?

We’re planning to offer an online course with both sheet music and video lessons. We have two different ideas for this course.

Ukulele Folk Songs as Chord Melodies

This course would include 10-12 ukulele chord melodies of folk songs. It would include video lessons to go with these folk songs. The videos will show close-ups of both the right-hand and left-hand techniques you need. The course will also go over right-hand variations, such as fingerpicking and claw-hammer. These variations create different effects on these songs. The songs are simple, so they are a good place to learn these new skills.

Classical Ukulele Chord Melody Arrangements

This course would have easy classical arrangements for ukulele. We will include music by Bach, Pachelbel, Schumann, and Beethoven. This music is a little more difficult than the ukulele folk songs as chord melodies.

Which one interests you more?

Why don’t you leave a comment below? We’re trying to decide what products to create next, based on your interests.

You want music that isn’t too hard to play. You don’t want to shift your left hand up and down the neck of the ukulele a lot. You’d prefer music lower than the 8th fret. You don’t want a lot of barre chords. And you want instruction on what to do with your right hand. Can the Ukulele Sisters provide this kind of music?

In the next part of this article, I’ll describe how we’ve developed our chord melodies over time to make them both easy to play and beautiful to listen to.

 The Development of Readable Ukulele Tab and Sakura

Over the past few years, we have been working on writing readable ukulele chord melody. Beautiful and clear sheet music helps people learn this skill from the beginning. We spent a lot of time trying to find a format that would make sense to people. You can read this article about Sakura to find out more. We asked people to let us know what format they liked best. Here is what we came up with.

 

We left the lyrics, strumming pattern, chords and melody on the top staff. People can sing and strum the song if they want. We notated the chord melody music in the bottom staff with rhythmic stems. People can figure out how to play the chord melody. This way the song fits onto one page and you can do it many different ways. We also gave people a chance to comment on the different types of notation here.

Sakura is in our book, 21 Easy Ukulele Folk Songs. I was so inspired when I heard Jake Shimabukuro play Sakura in the park in my community. He played so beautifully and we were so moved. I was happy to offer this song at an easier level. My version is something that less experienced players can access.

 

Do you want to play easy and full-sounding music?

A couple of years ago we developed an online course that teaches you to play ukulele chord melody. This course consists mainly of Christmas music. We offer it once a year between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Here are a couple of examples of the music in this course, Jingle Bells and Silent Night.

Can non-singers enjoy the ukulele?

Chord melody is perfect for when you want to play and you don’t want to sing. Whether you’re a good singer or not, it’s sometimes more fun to practice when you can hear the melody without singing it. You can combine chords and melody together at the same time. You make your own satisfying arrangement of the song.

Where can you get easy chord melodies?

Several of our books offer chord melody arrangements. The books that have chord melody are 21 MORE Ukulele Songs: Learn Intermediate Ukulele the Easy Way and 21 Easy Ukulele Folk Songs. Our Hymn Kits also offer up to 21 more chord melody arrangements.