Do something sensible or play “Voodoo Chile” on the banjo and “Born to be Wild” on the ukulele?

I did get around to listing all my blogs, Twitter accounts and other internet nonsense about a month ago: My Other Blogs

Since then it has pretty much been wall-to-wall uking . . . and making a tremendous racket playing my Birthday Banjo.  Not a banjolele this time but a real Tenor Banjo.  Tuned DGBE like a Baritone uke, so that I don’t have to learn yet another load of chord shapes.  Life is just too short!

Starting off on the uke learning “George Chords“,  ie. the old Ukulele Allstars system for naming gCEA chord shapes as if they were being plonked on a guitar, rather than the real ukulele chord names, has turned out rather handy.  I think the original idea was to make it easier for guitar players to take up the uke and vice versa. I don’t suppose Banjos came into the equation at that time.

And bugger Bluegrass when someones offering to show you how to play the Voodoo Chile riff!

Must buckle down soon and finish Ukes4Fun Songbook 10 – clocking up nearly 100 songs.  There will be 100 song sheets but there are a handful of duplicates, either the same song in different keys or the same song at different levels of difficulty.

Some of the songs in the early books have not been played for a long time. Some are poor little orphans, left behind when the original singer moved on and they are waiting for a new singer to adopt and lead them.  Others were carried over from The Allstars but have never found a new singer.  Like “Born to be Wild” in [C] . . . but I have just found a splendid version in [D] arranged by the San Jose Ukulele Club.  Tweaked it a little bit and have been having fun trying it out on different ukes and the banjo.

I do raaaaather like Steppenwolf and was going to add a Steppenwolf video but this ukulele version is . . . a must-watch! Very inventive, musically and visually!

Come on, how could you possibly you resist watching a “Born to be Wild” ukulele video by “Monkeys With Ladders“?  Perhaps I should also point out that the description includes, “I attached the camera to my ankle with a belt in order to get the motorcycle shots riding around Buffalo”.  If that doesn’t tempt you, well, there’s no hope for you really.

About Liz Panton (Ukulele Allsorts)

Singer-songwriter, music-maker, organiser and unionista, bit of a geek, life long learner - there is always room for improvement!