Tunes for beginners

Dowlo

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So I was reading a thread on here about a person picking up a Uke and after much scrutiny they played "five foot two". So I though myself what's that? I found the song and played in 5min. Love that song. ......are the others like this and how do I/we find them.
I really loved that era and the Uke does it justice.

I need more like that .....were to look?
 
I just always Googled ukulele 2 and 3 chord songs. Many songs written with difficult chords can still be played with 3 simple ones. i.e. C F G, C Am F G7 C7 G can get you thousands of songs. Add some 7ths like A7 E7 D7 C7 and you have lots of blues and jazzy numbers.
 
Buy a copy of "The Daily Ukulele" amazon.com has it pretty cheap and there are 365 easy uke songs. Many from the 20s and 30s. You will find Five Foot Two there along with Ain's She Sweet and many other cool uke songs.
 
Google "free ukulele songbook"

You will find about 30 free songbooks available for download that have been posted by ukulele clubs from all over the world. The vast majority of them are very simple songs to learn and play. Many of these collections have simplified versions of more difficult songs for beginners.

Depending on your style as a uke player there are other sources as well that are also absolutely free. I'm a singer/strummer (although the singing is pretty awful). One of the things I sussed straight off is that a C on a piano is pretty much the exact same sound as a C on a ukulele. So, as a singer strummer I find some usable music from the music section at my local library.

Piano sheet music is written with a heck of a lot of information on it. A lot of it has chord notations for accompanying instruments written above the piano music. These are pretty much exactly what you want for strumming on a ukulele. Virtually every popular music collection and screen/stage musical ever performed has sheet music written like this. You can even find it on piano music for Disney and Pixar cartoons. For instance, you can get the book for Lion King, and have all the chords to play any song in that movie...

To give you an idea of what to look for, these are the chords to Camelot, from the musical Camelot. I've circled the first line of chords. The attachment isn't very large for some reason, but it's big enough to show you what to look for.

View attachment 53752

Once you figure out that a C is a C is a C, you can use almost any sheet music that has a chord notation on it for strumming. I don't do any of the fancy picking that a lot of people do, but I suspect that if they could read piano music, they would be able to use it for that style of uke playing too.
 
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Thanks for the great information and advice guy's. I will drop a hint to my wife about the "Daily Ukulele" book for my birthday :)

In the meantime I'll do some searching as suggested.
 
here's another resource:

http://www.scorpexuke.com/songlist.html

lots of contemporary songs as well as uke classics there, you can sort the list by # of chords, artist, title, key etc plenty of simple 2,3 & 4 chord songs, all the way up to very complex ones.
 
added your own transpose

http://x.kazoolist.com

just cut and paste your own songs. use brackets for the chords. send me your transcribed songs and i'll add them to the list.

also added chord tip. check it then mouseover for the chord mappings.
 
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Search UU for 3 chord songs.

Big Thread There...
 
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