Bossa Nova

It is the stuff of gods! BUT, I know very little about it. Help me out here guys, what are the common chords? What are the strum methods?! what is the general solo style?!?!?!

For those of you who don't know what it bossa nova sounds like, give it a peep on the youtubes, a famous song using bossa nova would be "The girl from Ipanema". It's beautiful music and I want to play it on my uke. Any tips would be appreciated.

http://www.etc.ch/~jason/tabs.html
Theres a whole lot of bossa nova chords, its a lot of 7s and 6s.

As far as strumming goes this video is a nice demonstration of right hand technique on guitar:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-9Tw0WgWQo

On ukulele I try to go for an alternating bass with the third and second strings, with kind of a strum pick, like in the Uke minutes with jake, on the fourth, second, and first strings.

Heres a quick and dirty sound clip, just played open and barred at the second, done on laptop mic.:

http://www.mediafire.com/?iaotjqy5mzi

You might find low g a better tuning for bossa. That clip is in high g though.

Funny enough, the people that I learn to play from have a bossa nova combo called Lele de Bossa ("de", pronounced deh, means "with" in Japanese). They are in the process of making a lesson book with bossa tips and tabs. Don't know if there is such a book in English already though.
Low G indeed to make that bass come out in the picking pattern. Lots of patterns to choose from though, the easiest one being 0000 x000 0xxx x000 (0 is the strings you pluck) or something similar. Check how the guitarists do it and you can try to adapt that a bit to four strings.

How do you play the stuff? what chords, what strumming pattern??

I tried to get Ol Adrine to chat about it on ukegotmail, but he's already answered one of my questions on an episode, it wouldn't be fair to cover another one of my questions.

Check out James Hill's One Note Samba (or Dominator's for that matter) video on Youtube.

To get closer to the nylon string guitar style of Bossa Nova, try picking this basic backing pattern (for example, to sing along to):
(pick any chord, f.i. 5430 for two measures, than 3210 for two measures)


That's two whole counts and two half counts per measure for a basic backing pattern. With the chords above, try alternating the bass (G) string


This is the most simple pattern, listen to guitar players for rhythm variations, it can get quite complicated (in training myself as well). As far as I can gather, the point is to alternate bass / melody strings for the backing. Speed up to about 120 to 'feel' the rhythm better and go faster while maintaining the tempo (metronome!) until you can't get it wrong anymore.

The above is very basic and may not give you ready-to-play songs, but I hope this helps.

thanks for the help guys, the tab is little tricky to understand, but I'm getting a hold of it.

Well try this one, the first stroke is a "touch", you basically lightly pick the top strings, 1 or 2, then slow stroke down (like a strum but each string is heard seperately, then 3 up strokes...repeat as needed. It sounds harder than it is, and makes for a beautiful bossa nova sound. Alternatively, the slow down can be a fingernail roll...mix it up for even more fun! Hope it helps a little.

perfection

berylbite said:

It is the stuff of gods! BUT, I know very little about it. Help me out here guys, what are the common chords? What are the strum methods?! what is the general solo style?!?!?!

For those of you who don't know what it bossa nova sounds like, give it a peep on the youtubes, a famous song using bossa nova would be "The girl from Ipanema". It's beautiful music and I want to play it on my uke. Any tips would be appreciated.

Click to expand...

Check out Elis Regina singing Aguas de Marco (YT). If I can figure out the chords I'll post them.

Here's a youtube vid I did of Wave by Jobim
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cefjLCDtjjE

Might give you an idea.
I'm using a baritone ukulele here (which I think it awesome for Bossa Nova)
If your using a ukulele with the GCEA tuning definatley go Low G

By the way this is my first post:nana:

I don't play uke, just cavaquinho, so I'm not going to comment specifically on technique, but as a samba nut and percussionist I can fill in some of the background where rhythm stuff is concerned at least.

In bossa nova the guitar holds together the rhythm and samba feel. The pulse of samba has a higher bass tone on the 1 and 3, and a lower tone on the 2 and 4, if you are counting in 4/4. The thumb usually alternates, on a guitar or I suppose a uke, between the top and 2nd to top stings to provide this pulse. Apparently the low and high note are usually a 5th apart, but you can double up and just replay the high or the low you just used if you can't get to the 5th from the chord you're on.

Some of the most important rhythms that you'll commonly come across the are the bossa clave and teleco-teco.

bossa clave
x--x --x- --x- -x-- (where each group of 4 is 4 1/16 notes)... similar to the 3/2 son clave with the last beat shifted forward one 1/16 note.

Teleco-teco
-x-x --x- x-x- x--x

When you loop this it will actually sound like the pattern starts on the "a" of the fourth beat, since it misses the one. This one is extremely common in Samba of all kinds, and is indespensible... and unfortunately a little hard to pin down without hearing it. There are often additional notes added or deleted from this... the upshot is that the rhythms are more of a feel that the music should have, and can be suggested by playing around them. Samba is really rhythmically complex and bossa goes even farther and takes more liberties with the basic rhythms.

I'm not at all familiar with the chord progressions but they seem to be the super complex jazz 9th and 7th and weird stuff like that... Have fun with that .

Here's some youtube guitar videos I just found on a bossa rhythm, you can probably skip the first half of each where he shows all the guitar chords and just note the progression and figure the best uke voicings out. The rhythm in the the second one is a variation on the teleco-teco, but it's hard to make out.

Something I think is important to note: the guy in the video says that bossa is not swung... which is true in the sense that the 1/8th notes are not swung in the traditional american jazz manner. Samba has it's own swing that is in the 1/16th notes, the e is shifted a bit towards the &, and the a is maybe shifted a bit farther away from the & towards the 1. The upshot is that it has a feel that is hard for Americans to pick up, but the 1/8 notes end up being in time basically, so you probably don't have to worry about that too much at first. When you get into soloing or deeper into the rhythms, take the time to listen to a bunch of bossa and samba to begin to understand the feel and the samba swing.

#1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl8J2AcwngA

#2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCrcpulSZCU

You also might be intersted in checking out samba and pagode (a sub-genre of samba).
They both incorperate the cavaquinho, which is the steel stringed cousin of the uke, and have a lot of stumming. It's a lot of fun and would work well with the uke. If anyone is interested, pm me and maybe I'll through together a post of where to find stuff about other samba, which is not the easiest thing in the world without being able to read a little portuguese.