Ukulele For Dummies by Alistair Wood Read Free Book Online Page B

played in sequence.
    In this chapter, I introduce you to seven chords (two of which are confusingly known as seven chords !). These few chords are going to take you a long way, however, allowing you to build up a large repertoire of tunes and forming the basis of your future ukulele playing.
    Playing Music without Reading Music
    I have to make a confession: I read music at about the same speed as a dog reads Latin. (I also spend a lot of time chasing squirrels and drooling on the carpet, but that’s another story.)
    Charting the history of chords
    In the early days of music history, tunes were made up on single note lines. The earliest written music is the chanting of monks. Each monk would sing a tune that went its own merry way while the others sang their own lines. So each melody line was independent but fitted together harmoniously.
    As time went on, composers started to think more about how these lines fitted together and started to focus on the sound of sets of notes played at the same time – chords.
    Luckily, you don’t need to read music – you can play chords just by looking at the pictures.
    Reading chord diagrams
    A chord diagram shows you exactly which finger you need to put where in order to play a certain chord.
    A chord diagram represents the top five frets of the ukulele as you’d see them if you stood the ukulele up and looked straight at it, as in Figure 4-1.
    Figure 4-1: Top five frets on the ukulele neck.

    Take a look at Figure 4-2 to see what a chord diagram looks like.
    Figure 4-2: A sample chord diagram.

    Here are the parts of the chord diagram:
    Vertical lines represent the strings of the ukulele, starting with the g-string on the far left, moving to the A-string on the far right.
    The thick horizontal line at the top represents the nut of the ukulele.
    Thin horizontal lines represent the frets. The first line below the nut is the first fret and the very bottom line is the fifth fret.
    The dots show you exactly where to put your fingers. For example, if a dot is on the far left line between the first and second line, you need to hold down the g-string at the second fret.
    The dots always appear on a vertical line and between the horizontal lines.
    The 0s at the top are strings that are played open, which means you don’t fret them at all.
    The numbers at the bottom tell you which finger to use to fret that particular string:
    â€¢ 1 = Index finger
    â€¢ 2 = Middle finger
    â€¢ 3 = Ring finger
    â€¢ 4 = Little finger
    Not all chord diagrams start at the nut. If you see a chord diagram that doesn’t have a thick black line at the top, a number should appear at the top right (or sometimes left). In these cases you need to treat the top line as the fret given rather than the nut. You can see an example of this in the Csm chord in Figure 6-25.
    Deciphering chord diagrams for lefties
    Chord diagrams can be tricky for left-handed beginners. You need to create some way to interpret or ‘see’ the regular diagrams in a way that makes sense for you. I’ve heard of two ways that left-handers imagine chord diagrams:
    Picture the chords as a mirror image: This method is definitely the best way of interpreting the chord charts when you’re forming chords.
    See ‘through’ the neck: Imagine the neck of your ukulele is made of glass and you can see the frets and your fingers through it. So the standard chord diagram would be like holding the ukulele in front of you with the fretboard pointing away from you. You just need to mimic what you see in the chord diagram on your ukulele.
    Playing a Song Using Two Chords
    In this section, you get to work on your first song. It takes only two chords: C and F.
    Creating a C chord
    The first chord to tackle is the C chord. It uses only one finger and so is dead easy to play. Figure 4-3 shows the chord diagram.
    On the diagram, the g-, C- and E-strings all have 0 at the top of them. That means you don’t have to