Tunings for Acoustic Guitar Accompaniment with Ukulele

Hello all,

I enjoyed playing my acoustic guitar in the tuning DADGAD before I started focusing on the ukulele, which I play in GCEA. I'm wanting to arrange some music (for multi tracking)for the acoustic guitar and the ukulele, with the acoustic covering the low-end and I'm not sure how friendly DADGAD and GCEA would work out. I've considered the ukulele D tuning ADF#B, but the G string in DADGAD on the guitar doesn't seem to play well with the F# in the ADF#B uke tuning. I've considered a DADF#AD tuning for the guitar to make it work better with the Uke D tuning.

So yeah, I'm musing here, but I think it's fun the think about and get feedback from more experienced ukulele players. How do people usually approach acoustic guitar/ukulele accompaniment? Like I mentioned, I usually don't play guitar in standard EADGBE. What do you think? How about my mad scientist idea for the tunings I mentioned above? Thank you in advance.

Everybody in Hawai'i plays in a different slack key guitar tuning. No one ever changed theirs because it worked better when playing with a uke.

As Uncle Led would say, "Jus' press..." (As is, jus' press the right frets!)

Hippie Guy said:

No one ever changed theirs because it worked better when playing with a uke.

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Yeah, I hear you. My thought process was to get something that worked together with the tunings I was familiar with, since I would be playing all the instruments.

Why not try ADGA and play the same shapes as the middle 4 strings of the guitar. Just a thought.

ErnieElse said:

Why not try ADGA and play the same shapes as the middle 4 strings of the guitar. Just a thought.

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That's a good idea.. Worth trying out.

Whatever chords you are playing by NAME in DADGAD tuning, you can compliment on ukulele in GCEA tuning by playing the ukulele fingerings for the same NAME of the chord.

A 'G' chord is the same basic intervals no matter if guitar, uke, piano mandolin, etc...

As to VOICING the chords, on guitar in DADGAD you have more versatility to play different inversions of the chords, simply because you have a wider note range than the 2.5 octaves (or 3 if linear tuning) available on GCEA ukulele...

This ^ is if you want to make sure that the notes from ukulele are not stepping on the notes from the guitar, OR if you want some unisons with the combination of the two instruments, you can arrange it how you want, and see which way has a good blend or avoids a cacophony of 'muddiness' and creates space to allow the distinctive sound of each instrument to be heard without using tons of EQ and compression and reverb to munge and morph the recording into something that sounds pleasant.

If you play a chord on the guitar and the notes are below the G4 on re-entrant ukulele or below the G3 of linear tuned ukulele, most likely you will be fine, just as long as you are in the same key, or the 'relative minor' key on the 'other' instrument, and play the chords that are enharmonic with each other...

There's lots to play with here, but the premise is simple, however it's easy to overthink all of this, and then you end up like 'a babe lost in the woods' (to pinch Gershwin lyrics from 'Someone to Watch Over Me')...

Hope this helps!