baritone uke fingerpicking - arpeggios with alternating base

phydaux

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Hey all! Newbie looking for feedback.

So I'm working on fingerpicking on my low-d baritone ukulele. Now when you do an alternating bass line you pluck the root note and then the fifth note. And with a properly inverted chord, the fifth note is in the bass.

OK, if all I want to do is a simple bass line then I can totally do simple power chord fingering on the 3rd & 4th strings and pluck root-fifth-root-fifth over and over until my hair wants to fall out. And when I'm playing along as part of a ukulele ensemble then that's probably exactly what I'm going to do, given the instrument I'm playing and it's role in a ukulele ensemble.

But I want to finger pick arpeggios.

So I look at, for example, an open C fingering and the only root note in the chord shape is on the 2nd string, fifth on the 3rd. Well, do I alternate between root and fifth on the 2nd & 3rd string, and then arpeggio the first & second string? That seems like a lot of plucking the same note over and over.

Or do I limit myself to barre chords with the root on the 3rd string and the fifth on the 4th, like the barre G form?
 
Thanks for the reply, Bill.

At this point I think I'm just gonna get my metronome and practice chord progressions in G, C, & A. I'll alternate 4-3-4-3 with my thumb on the downbeats, and arpeggiate 2-1-2-1 with I & M on the up beats, and work through a standard 8-bar I - IV - V - ii - vi - V - IV - I using open CAGED chords. Once I can do that, I'll start throwing in pinches.

I think I'm just overthinking things, worrying about "properly inverted chords." It would be different if I had six strings to work with.

I DO start to wonder, though, if maybe "properly inverted chords" isn't the whole point behind re-entrant tuning on a four-string instrument - So you can play 4 -3 -4-3 and you WILL BE playing a properly inverted root - fifth - root - fifth line. Does it actually work out that way, can someone tell me?
 
Plucking the root and the fifth is all good theory if your playing a piano yet part of what makes ukuleles and guitars sound they way they do is that often classic music theory gets thrown out the window.
Your actually over thinking it. When I play alternative bass note picking, which is what I do, I alternately play the fourth and third strings, because that's what's simple to do on a ukulele.
With guitars and ukuleles we don't always play in a linear fashion as is easy to do on a piano. We often play "sideways" to different chord inversions and in fact that's what now sounds "normal" to people who play and listen to guitar/ukulele music.

Since we are talking baritone, a D maj chord is 0232, G maj is 0003 and A maj is either 2220 or 2225. This is our simple 3 chords in the key of D major. Now if you were to try to play in as linear fashion as possible you would always play G maj to A maj as 0003 then 2225. However, in some songs this just doesn't "work" even though its theoretically correct. Sometimes the song just works better if you use the A maj form of 2220, rather than 2225. Our ears are just used to it.

So again I feel that you are over thinking things. Keep it simple and alternate between the fourth and third strings even if its not the root and the fifth. That's just ukuleles/guitars for you.
 
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