Fingerstyle Yule-kulele, Part 1- Working thru a fingerstyle piece

For anyone wanting to work up a little bit special ukulele piece for the holidays -

There are lots of fingerstyle pieces for ukes tuned to low g. If you go to a sheet music site and search uke, fingerstyle, christmas, there are quite a few choices. The one here is from Musicnotes. com, i think. But my other go-to is Sheet Music Plus.

So let's look at First Noel used here. Step 1 - pick out the notes of the tune on your uke. Step 2 - Now go thru the song using chords. Remember that chords are just arpeggios. So the chords for a certain section will have the notes for the tune in that measure in it.

Step 3 - have a pencil ready and a flat surface. You're going to mark up your sheet music as you go with  tips to yourself about how to finger the chord so that you can emphasize the note and be prepared to have an easy fingering for the next note that's coming. This is a very wordy way of saying it, whereas the exercise of doing it isn't that hard.

Simplified - Identify the notes you NEED to hit the melody. Peel off or SUBTRACT the fingers from the full chord that you don't need. You rarely need the full chord.

Here's a link to a jpg of the sheet music.

For instance, at Bar 4, we have a C chord with notes C, E & G indicated. Well, I felt I need the G for the tune. For the chord effect, i don't need the whole chord and to twist my fingers up like a pretzel. Need G, so cant also have E on string 2. We can get a 2 note harmony from C on the low string at 5th fret. Like a double stop in violin. And the lower C doesnt dominate like the high C would over the G. Finger this stop in the F chord shape formation.

That's just one example. I'm not going to take your fun away and make all the suggestions for you. The main points are, you don't need the whole chord - subtract from it the fingers you really don't need.

Since we found a fairly complete arrangement, i played pretty much as written. Here's the link to a short VIDEO CLIP. (Be kind. I'm just a part-time uke player  - Chet-Knopfler joke.)

In the next post, Part 2, we'll take a look at how to come up with the barebones of your own fingerstyle adaptation or arrangement.