Alternate Tunings for Ukulele

[Nickie]

Two new friends from Sweden just loaned me their ukulele songbook. Most of the songs are in Swedish and they are all in D tuning.

[cdkrugjr]

Nylon strings don’t have quite the same resilience as do steel, but you can try pretty much anything up or down a tone with most bog standard uses.

See if you can find a copy of The Uke Buke for a bunch of arrangements gc’e’g’ (Open C w/ Low G)

[Joe King]

Two new friends from Sweden just loaned me their ukulele songbook. Most of the songs are in Swedish and they are all in D tuning.

You can either put a capo on the 2nd fret to play in the correct key relative to the D6 tuning, or otherwise completely ignore that and just use the same fingerings shown in the song books, in the standard C6 tuning, although you will not be playing in a key (or keys) with chord shapes that are very different to the standard C6 chord shapes, as the D6 chord shapes will have different fingerings for C, G, etc.

Also, if the chord had a named pictogram, and it shows a C chord, etc, just play that same named chord in whatever tuning you have. If someone is playing guitar, piano, uke etc and playing a C chord, and say looking at standard notation, that C chord will at least have the C, E, and G notes in it on every one of those instruments.

So the D tuning in the song book does not have to be an obstacle, unless you want it to.