Transposing from Piano to Uke (Low G tuning)

Hi all,

I'm new to the Uke and have been away from playing music for quite a while. When I played Saxophone and Clarinet I used to transpose piano notation so I could play it on my other instruments.

I have some songs I would like to transpose for Uke (Low G tuning) but cannot seem to find any information on how many steps/semitones I need to adjust.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

You don't need to adjust piano music for uke the way you do for horns - as long as the notes fit within the range of notes on your low G uke, you shouldn't have any issues. I do this all the time; once in a while I need a low F and then I'll need to transpose to a different key but not often.

If I'm buying piano music, I'll use one of the online services such as musicnotes.com that allow you to choose the key you'd like to purchase - I find that F works quite well on uke.

Janeray1940,

Thanks for the tips. So if I have a song that doesn't fit within the range of the Uke, do I just transpose however many steps up until it fits? I find that easy with chords, but tedious with standard notation.

JerryRoss said:

Janeray1940,

Thanks for the tips. So if I have a song that doesn't fit within the range of the Uke, do I just transpose however many steps up until it fits? I find that easy with chords, but tedious with standard notation.

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You're welcome! And yes, it's a bit tedious, which is why I like the online music sites that will do it for me

II have been trying to find online websites where I can enter in my own standard notation for piano and then transpose to Ukw with tabs listed below, but I haven't been able to find any.

Suggestions?

Transposition

JerryRoss said:

II have been trying to find online websites where I can enter in my own standard notation for piano and then transpose to Ukw with tabs listed below, but I haven't been able to find any.

Suggestions?

Click to expand...

What I do, quite frequently, is to type a piece of music into ABC format then use one of the freely available utilities, either on-line or a local program, to transpose it to the key(s) I require.

Tabledit will import ABC script and present it in ukulele TAB, though you'll have to pay for it if you want to do more than 16 bars at a time.

I play a variety of instruments (not necessarily well!) but can only read (reasonably) fluently for a "D" whistle (or descant recorder), mandolin or guitar. So my clarinet gets played as a recorder and my ukulele as a guitar. As a purely "play-at-home" amateur I feel this is a more optimal solution than trying to become familiar with multiple fingerings.

Hope this helps

is there any tutorial on how to convert a piano music sheet to uke tabs?

1300cc said:

is there any tutorial on how to convert a piano music sheet to uke tabs?

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There really isn't a tutorial. In order to convert music from one form to another would require a decent level of music theory knowledge.

When transferring from piano to uke, you have to be able to:

1.) Understand sheet music (i.e. read the staff and figure out what notes are what)
2.) Know what key it's in and what chords are being played around within the sheet music (sometimes it's easy to spot, sometimes not so much)
3.) Identify the melody within the song.

Once you've done that, then you can proceed to tab it out onto the uke. But even then, you won't always get the voicing quite right and will have to play around with it quite a bit.