mike's web log

It is (was?) a tradition in high school annuals to have a selection of "senior superlatives" — "best looking", "funniest", "most likely to succeed", like that. I was thinking about Christmas songs and thought we should devise superlatives for those as well. Here are my votes.

Weirdest premise: "Little Drummer Boy"

Least Christmas-y "Christmas" song: "Hallelujah" (Leonard Cohen). Honorable mention: "River" (Joni Mitchell). Second runner-up: "My Favorite Things"

Most suggestive: "Santa Baby"

Most likely to inspire you to break up with your true love: "The Twelve Days of Christmas"

Most repetitive: "Feliz Navidad". Honorable (though at least amusing) mention: "The Twelve Days of Christmas"

Most dismaying example of social capital as a function of recognition by influencers: "Rudolf, the Red-Nosed Reindeer"

Most likely to get someone in trouble: "Baby, It's Cold Outside"

Creepiest 24/7 surveillance: "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town"

Most unexpected rhyme: "Good King Wenceslas" (Feast of Stephen/crisp and even)

Least remember-able lyrics: "Frosty the Snowman"

Most confounding question of where the commas go: "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" (click to watch video)

Strangest/least known second and subsequent verses: "Jingle Bells"

Most obvious declaration of holiday greetings as a transactional exchange for payment in the form of figgy pudding: "We Wish You a Merry Christmas"

Most obviously translated line: "Silent Night" (round yon virgin)

Most disappointing from otherwise good songwriter: "Wonderful Christmastime". Honorable Mention: "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)"

Saddest: "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"

Most number of references to ghosts in a Christmas song: "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year"

Most northern-climates coded: "White Christmas"

Containing lyric most likely to make some people uncomfortable: "Deck the Halls"

Most insulting to the protagonist: "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch"

Least appropriate for an elementary-school holiday program: "All I Want for Christmas Is You". Honorable mention: several others.

I have an electric ukulele, which has a jack on the side:

At some point I noticed that the jack had come loose — the nut that holds the jack tight had come off and disappeared and the jack had fallen back into the body of the ukulele.

Well, I thought, I'll go get a replacement nut to hold the jack in place. The first thing I had to figure out was what exactly I was looking for. The nut that holds the jack tight is called a jack nut (reasonably) or a switch nut (because it's used in electronics to hold switches tight):

At that point I decided that I should contact the company I'd gotten the uke from, a small firm that I think (?) is in Oregon. After some back and forth I managed to convey what the issue was. They were then happy to send me a replacement nut. But … it didn't fit. Given how hard it had been to try to get sizing info for the nut, I wasn't sure that going back and forth with them was going to be fruitful.

Ok, I decided, time to go to the real pros: Tacoma Screw Products. This is the kind of place you can go and say (as I did back in my motorcycle days) "I need a galvanized 12-millimeter bolt that's 3-1/2 inches long and has a 1.5 thread pitch" and they'll be all like "coming right up, boss".

I took the uke in and showed it to the guy at the counter. He got out a ruler and a pitch gauge, then said "Let me see what we have". He went in the back and came out with a selection of nuts that we tried. But once again, nothing quite fit. A second counter guy came over — nothing like a little fit problem to pique the interest of a bolt professional — and he had a look, too.

We were sort of stumped at that point, but then the second guy asked "Have you tried American Music?" It turns out that there's a music store not far from TSP that has a full-service repair shop. Huh. Well, I had nothing to lose, right?

So I took my problem to them. There were four of us hunched over looking at the uke, and the guitar tech asked if he could take the uke in the back. You bet. After a bit of time, he came back out and said "Got it!" He'd rooted around in a box of loose jack nuts that they had on a shelf, and lo and behold, he found one that fit. Perfect. I offered to pay for the part and/or for their time, but they wouldn't hear of it.

There were some lessons here for me. One, of course, was to not let the jack nut come loose, whoops. Then I learned about jack/switch nuts and that there is surprising variation in their sizes. Then I learned that if you have an instrument-repair issue, take it to an instrument-repair shop. (My final stop would probably have been an electronics store like Vetco, where they surely have switch nuts?)

Something I already knew but that was reinforced is the value of patronizing stores that are staffed by experts — people who know their stuff and who are pleased to help. So a shout-out again to McLendon['s] Hardware and Dunn Lumber, to Tacoma Screw Products and to American Music, all staffed by super-helpful, knowledgeable folks.

__________

[1] Nearly universally called "McLendon's" with that nice possessive s, including in the URL of the company itself (www.mclendons.com).

These are recordings I've made of me playing solo ukulele. Unless otherwise noted, the tunes come from Graded Repertoire for Ukulele: Classical, Volume 1, a book by Jeff Peterson. The arrangements are his.

Johannes Brahms, "Berceuse" (often known as "Brahms's Lullaby")
Recorded September 6, 2021

Matteo Carcassi, "Andantino"
Recorded June 4, 2021

Grieg, "Hall of the Mountain King"
Recorded May 16, 2021

Ferndando Sor, "Study No. 3"

Recorded April 14, 2021

Ferndando Sor, "Study No. 2"

Recorded March 14, 2021

Dionisio Agudao, "Estudio No. 1"

Recorded February 1, 2021

I've been working from the book Graded Repertoire for Classical Ukulele with arrangements by Jeff Peterson. I'm plugging away at learning to translate written music to ukulele strings and learning some basic techniques from classical guitar as applied to the ukulele.

Update I decided to make a single blog entry that tracks these recordings. (The link to this recording is repeated there.)

I could practice the same pieces forever, probably. So I thought I'd finish them as you do when you take piano lessons: perform them. In my case, I thought I'd record the pieces I really liked, and then declare myself done with those pieces. This is my first effort, "Estudio No. 1" by Dionisio Aguado (1784-1849), arranged for uke, as noted, by Jeff Peterson. This is the 4th piece in Grade 1 (of 8), and has been my favorite so far.

On the ukulele (as with guitar), the idea of movable chords is that the shapes you learn for open chords constitute patterns. By adding a barre, you can move the shapes up the fretboard to form new chords. For example, you can take the C shape, move it up 2 frets, and get a D:

If this is a new concept for you, may I recommend my booklet on movable shapes for ukulele (PDF).

In this post I want to talk about the patterns—the relationships—for moving these patterns around the fretboard. Bear with me while I explain this notion.

On the concert uke, there are basically 5 shapes for playing movable major chords[1]:

In addition to making it easy for you to move a C shape to a D shape (for example), this means that there are 5 ways to play any given major chord. Here are 5 ways to play a C major chord:

There's a relationship—a kind of circle—among these shapes in terms of how you can move between these different ways to play the same chord. I'll show you the diagram and then illustrate how it works.

Here's a different, more formula-like way to indicate the same thing:

C shape + 3 frets = A shape
A shape + 2 frets = G shape
G shape + 2 frets = F shape
F shape + 3 frets = D shape
D shape + 2 frets = C shape

What does all of this mean? It means that when you play a major chord using a movable shape—any major chord, any movable shape—you can easily figure out how to play the same chord using the other shapes.

I'll start by illustrating this using the C shape:

Per the diagram/formula earlier, we can make another C chord by taking the open C shape, moving up 3 frets (C shape + 3 frets), and making an A shape:

Following the formula, to make another C chord, we can move up 2 more frets and make a G shape (A shape + 2 frets = G shape):

Keep going. If you're making a C using the G shape, the next C chord is 2 frets up and using the F shape:

Move the F shape up 3 frets and make a D shape, and you've got yet another C chord:

Finally, move the D shape up 2 more frets and you've back to the original C shape:

I say that this pattern is circular because you can wrap around, so to speak. Start anywhere in the circle to make a shape. Move up or down the designated number of frets, make the next shape, and you've got the same chord. For example, here's a sequence of A chords starting on the open A shape. Notice that the intervals (number of frets) between each of the shapes follows the diagram/formula from earlier:

The pattern is also circular because you can move backward, i.e., down the fretboard the designated number of frets. For example, if you're making an A chord on the 7th fret using the D shape, you can make an A chord move down 3 frets to the 4th fret and switch to the F shape. (D shape minus 3 frets = F shape)

A couple of additional notes:

• For purposes of this exercise, open chords are fret 0 (zero). For example, if you make an open A chord and want to make the same chord in the G shape, the formula says to move up 2 frets. Zero plus 2 is 2, so barre the second fret.
• Fret 12 is the equivalent of fret 0—in other words, any chord that you make by barring fret 12 is the same as the open chord. If you get to the point where the numbers take you to fret 12, just go back to an open shape.
• There are similar circular patterns for other chords—minor, 7ths, etc. I'll put those together in the fullness of time. Teaser: the patterns—the number of frets between chords—is the same for minor chords as for major chords; in other words, you already have the circular pattern for minor chords.

And finally, why is it useful to know this thing? Obviously, you don't sit around moving from shape to shape for any given chord when you're playing.

For me, this has helped a bit as I try to visualize where the chords are on the fretboard. When I initially started with movable chords, it felt a bit like they were just scattered around on the fretboard. ("I know there's a C chord in an A shape, but where is it?") I could look them up in the "dictionary" of the movable chords booklet, but as I worked with the shapes it became clear that there were patterns to how the different fingerings for the same chord were related. So I just sat down and worked it out.

I think this is probably an interim measure for learning out the locations of chords. I imagine that after many, many, many hours of practice, you just know where the several C chords are, and the A chords, and the G chords, and so on, and you don't have to calculate it. In the meantime, I keep a sticky note on my music stand with this major chord circle.

[1] As I note in the booklet, there are also 3-string chords and occasionally some open chords that it isn't practical to move because they're just too darned awkward to barre. I'm sticking here with a basic theory of movable chords.

[categories]   music, , ukulele

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Every year I get out the trusty Hal Leonard Christmas Carols for Solo Ukulele book and see if I can remember the ones I learned the year before and maybe learn a new one. Then I use my primitive home recording setup to record them, just for fun.

Here are recordings of some of them that I made this year. These are all MP3 files that are about a minute long and all less than 1 MB.

PS I'm not a very good uke player.

Note: For technical reasons that I don't understand, you might have to refresh the page after listening to a track before you can listen to a different track. Sorry :(

Merry Christmas!

• The words only make sense if you know that it commemorates a siege and bombardment. What "perilous fight" are we talking about here? What's up with the "rockets' red glare"? In the second line, "what so proudly we hail'd," what does what refer to? Not that this is necessarily important, but what war is this?
  


• The musical range, an octave plus a fifth, is at about the limit of the range for amateur singers. There's more than one reason that people applaud when singers hit that "home of the FREE". :-)

[T]he financially hard-pressed Mozart had an opportunity to earn some money by writing for the flute, an instrument he disliked. A Dutch patron of music and flautist, M. de Jean, commissioned in 1778 a group of flute works, which Mozart had to supply in a hurry. He brought forth three flute quartets and two flute concertos.

Of the latter [that is, the concertos] the one in D is undoubtedly the C major oboe concerto transcribed. As "almost conclusive evidence" Alfred Einstein points to the fact that in its D major flute form, the violin parts of the concerto never go below A on the G-string, indicating that the whole work was simply transcribed a whole tone upwards.

This oboe concerto was first published in its present form in 1948, the editors using old manuscript parts in the Mozarteum library at Salzburg, but the music has long been known as the Flute Concert in D major, with the same K. number.

[I]f the bridge is placed at exactly the theoretical position (nut - 12th fret distance multiplied by 2), the fretted notes will get progressively sharper the further up the fingerboard one plays. This is because fretting the strings stretches them by a small amount, raising the tension and therefore the pitch of the notes produced. Action height is normally lowest at the nut and highest at the last fret, so the sharping effect increases with distance from the nut. To compensate for this, length is added to the string at the bridge end. The amount necessary varies from string to string, generally increasing from treble to bass. "Intonation" means adjusting this compensation until the open notes and the 12th fret notes of each string are exactly one octave apart. (Paul Guy, "Tuning the Guitar")