Help with ukulele to guitar

I have a friend who insists that she wants to play guitar even though I have told her that she will be able to play music much sooner if she plays the ukulele. She is bringing her guitar over to my place and wants me to teach her a few basic chords.How do I adapt the ukulele chords to her acoustic guitar?
PS. I have two ukuleles and I'll bet when she sees how much easier it is to play, I may have a convert on my hands. I will keep you updated here.

You could just use the top 4 strings. Then your uke chords will be the same as baritone uke chords on the guitar. Beyond that, there is no real comparison as you have to do something with the two bass strings. The only exception I can think of would be your D uke chord. This will be A on the guitar as the bottom two guitar strings will be played open 002220 instead of 2220 on the uke

I think it would be handy to show her how to read the chord diagrams and strumming.

If you really want to play together using the same finger patterns you must put a capo on the 5th fret of the guitar - otherwise evrything you attempt together will most likely sound like crap due to the different tunings of both instruments (unless you play a bari of course)

Tell her to go play guitar with a guitarists?

foxisaac said:

I think it would be handy to show her how to read the chord diagrams and strumming.

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Excellent idea! If one can read ukulele chord diagrams and tabs, one can move on to guitar. Same principle, but with two added strings.

Strumming patterns are the same, too.

Chord shapes, however, are vastly different. Similar shapes make different chords on each instrument (unless you're using a baritone). You may want to warn your friend of this before you start.

It would be great if your friend could bring her own guitar chord charts. You could play the ukulele fingerings, while she plays the guitar fingerings. You still may not make it through one full song, but she may start to get a feel for it.

I would focus on the chords that have complete guitar fingerings using strings 1-4 on the guitar. These would be (on ukulele)

G - 0232 D on guitar
G7 - 0212 D7 on guitar
Gm - 0231 Dm on guitar
D - 2220 A on guitar
D7 - 2020 A7 on guitar
Dm - 2210 Am on guitar
Dm7 - 2010 Am7 on guitar

.....and then maybe get into a few chords that have extended fingering such as

C- 0003 G on guitar 32-0003 (the dash after the "32" denotes where the extended fingerings begin)
A-2100 E on guitar 02-2100
Am- 2000 Em on guitar 02-2000
F- 2010 C on guitar 03-2010 (F and Dm7 have the same pattern, see above)

You could go on and on but this would be enough to maybe play a few songs together. You would have to play different chord shapes to play together but it wouldn't be hard to make the adjustment. Once you see the common elements between guitar and uke there are way more similarities than differences.

I bet it would be a lot of fun to work together in this way, and everyone would probably learn something in the process!

If your friend wants to play guitar she just has to look up the chord shapes and learn them. My wife thought she wouldn't like stringed instruments after growing up playing piano. She started off playing my ukuleles, and one day said she wanted to try playing guitar. I went out and bought her a guitar the same day. Now she has two guitars and plays ukulele and guitar daily. There is room in the world for both. We get along just fine and she is happy. In fact I play low G on ukulele and she likes the reentrant tuning. We still get along fine and happily play music together.

Its pretty simple really pick a song to play then draw out the guitar chord shapes and then start playing.

A chord is a chord no matter what instrument you play it on uke, guitar or piano.
A Chord is just a group of notes all played together. Any major chord is a chord having a root, a major third, and a perfect fifth.
An example being the C chord is these 3 notes Root is C, Major third is the E and that makes the perfect 5th the G note.

So knowing this means there are no such thing as a Ukulele chord or a Guitar chord just that there are chord shapes to hold the needed notes on a given instrument.