Moveable Chord Shapes On the Ukulele Part 2 - Taking Your Ukulele Chords to New Heights

 So here we are at part 2, ready to take our ukulele chords to new heights up the neck! (Ha! See what I did there? Don't mind me, it's late in the day, and I should be going to bed instead of drafting a new ukulele blog post, but here I am.)

Okay, so now you've practice those chord shapes from the previous post, right? Yah? And you got 'em down, right? Yah? Because now we're going to do a little bit of fun with the CAGED chord system and start moving these chords up the neck to add some dimension to our playing. 

We're going to start our journey with the F major chord, and how we can move that up the neck of the ukulele. Play the F major chord on your ukulele like you normally would for a few strums. Then place your pinky (or your ring finger, if your reach is long enough) on the third fret of that first string and add a C note to your F major chord so that it looks like this:

Now we're going to use the E major chord shape at that third fret on the first string to play our F major chord a few frets up on the neck of the ukulele! Make the E major chord shape on that third fret and you have a variation of the F major chord!

Next from there, we're going to take that E major chord shape (you should have your three fingers on the fifth frets of the second, third, and fourth strings) and we're going to use that as our jumping off point for the next chord shape, the C major shape.

But if you look at the image here, you'll notice that the C major shape requires us to use a barre chord - this means we're going to use the index finger to press down on all four strings at the fifth fret (takes a little bit of practice to do this, but yes, I'll do a blog about this and a quick video with some tips) and use either your ring finger (if your reach is long enough) or your pinky finger to press down on the eighth fret of the first string. This is your F major chord played in the C major chord shape!

Last but not least, we have the fabulous B flat major shape for our C chord - just shift your fingers a bit. We're going to barre the the first two strings at the eighth fret, and then play the ninth fret of the third string, and the tenth fret of the fourth string. That's the same shape you'd make for your B flat major chord in first position at the top of the ukulele. 

Play through these a few times and get the hang of what they feel like as you move up the neck of your ukulele. Because in my next post, I'm going to break down how to apply this to other major chords up the neck of the ukulele! Have fun!