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Fingerstyle Ukulele

Overview

Our Fingerstyle Ukulele series features arrangements for solo ukulele. We are focusing on easier arrangements for now, but plan to add intermediate and advanced arrangements in the future.

What Is Included

  • Standard notation and tablature
  • Fingering for right and left hands

What Is NOT Included

Because these arrangements are intended to be played as solos, they do not include the following:

  • Chord symbols or diagrams
  • Lyrics

Required Skills

  • Switching between chords smoothly
  • Playing in different positions on the neck
  • Right hand techniques including arpeggios, plucking, and strumming

More advanced arrangements may include hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, harmonics, and other techniques.

Fingering

The music includes suggested fingerings for both the right and left hand. Some fingerings are intended to help make the music easier to play, bring out the melody, etc. However, feel free to use a different fingering if the suggestions don't work for you.

Fingering may be omitted from some parts of the music. This includes repetitions of the same passage or a repeated pattern such as an arpeggio pattern.

We refer to right and left and fingering below. If you play left handed, the same information applies but to the opposite hand.

Right Hand Fingering

We use standard classical guitar fingering for the right hand. Fingerings are indicated with the letters pima. The letters correspond to a specific finger as follows:

  • p - Thumb
  • i - Index
  • m - Middle
  • a - Ring

The pinky is rarely used, but it will be indicated with the letter e if it is.

Right hand fingering may appear as a single letter or multiple letters stacked on top of one another. A single letter incidates to use that finger to play the note. If letters are stacked, you play the notes or chord with the combination of fingers indicated. For example, if you see the letters pim stacked above a chord, you would play the chord with your thumb, index, and middle fingers.

Left Hand Fingering

Left hand fingering is indicated with numbers 1 to 4 as follows:

  • 1 - Index
  • 2 - Middle
  • 3 - Ring
  • 4 - Pinky

It is rare for the thumb to be used for fretting, but if it is, it will be indicated by the letter T.

Chord Fingering

Fingering for some chords may be a little confusing because of the ukulele's reentrant tuning. A reentrant tuning is one where the strings don't go in order from lowest to highest pitch. In the standard high G tuning, the 4th string is tuned to G. It is higher in pitch than both the 2nd and 3rd strings. If the G string is included in the chord, the fingering may not be stacked order of finger placement. The fingering numbers are placed next to the pitch you play with each finger.

Strumming Direction and Fingering

Some arrangements include up or down arrows to indicate the direction of a strum along with the right hand finger to use. The arrow direction is based on the order of the strings, so they go in the opposite direction of your strum. An up arrow is used for a down strum because you start the strum with the 4th string, which is the bottom line in the tablature. This might be a little counterintuitive, but it makes sense when you consider the direction required to strum the strings in the correct order.

Difficulty Level

Easy

Our easy fingerstyle ukulele arrangements require the following skills:

  • Smoothly switching between chords
  • Playing in different positions on the neck - The position changes will often occur after an open string or a rest, which allow time to switch to the new position.
  • Basic right hand fingerstyle techniques like simple arpeggio patterns, plucking multiple strings at once, and some strumming

The arrangements generally include a single verse and the chorus (if there is one) and no extras such as introductions or interludes. This keeps the arrangements shorter and easier to learn.

Other levels will be added in the future.

Tempos

Tempos are editorial suggestions in most cases. Other tempos will work for a lot of music. Feel free to choose your own tempo.

Ukulele Range

A lot of the music in this series can be played on a ukulele with as few as 12 frets. However, some music requires more frets to cover the entire range of the melody. If you want to play a particular title, we recommend looking at the preview of the music to determine the highest fret used in the music.

Notation

Arrangements are notated so that the melody is shown in a separate voice from the accompaniment. The melody will generally be the upstem notes in the notation.