Cracking the Ukulele Movable Chord Code!

 Well, hello there, 2024! Part of my goals for the coming year is to learn how to play my chords all the way up the neck of the ukulele. Why? Well, back at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, I was watching a lot of ukulele videos on YouTube, and I saw a video of the amazing Taimane Gardner playing some kind of medley of incredible songs going aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall the way up the neck of that uke of hers. Someone in the comments quipped, "Taimane paid for the whole uke, she gonna use the whole uke," and I knew right then that I wanted to master the fretboard of the ukulele. 

But being a ukulele noob, it was hard for me to find the info I wanted. I stumbled across bits and bobs here and there, but nothing that would really show me how to play chords up the neck of the ukulele. I did find one website that would show you all the different positions of the chords if you typed them into their internal search engine, but it seemed like a major PITA to do that for every chord I wanted to learn and I couldn't find any kind of rhyme or reason for moving them seamlessly up the neck. 

Then in my travels for learning how to play guitar, I stumbled on something called the CAGED system. Once I understood the basics (and I still can't play guitar very well, but at least I'm having fun trying), I thought, This is exactly the kind of thing we need in the ukulele world.

Last winter, I took a couple of music theory courses specifically for ukulele, but they still left me feeling a little confused about how to move my ukulele chord shapes up the neck. 

Soooooo I was really excited for this latest round of Uke-Jitsu with Andrew Molina, because we really dove in to the whole movable chord thing. And LO AND BEHOLD I have cracked the movable chord code! Thanks to Andrew's method of teaching, I was able to finally sit down and make some notes of my own and now I am thrilled to say that I can confidently figure out how to move (most of) my chord shapes up the neck of the uke! I'm finally gonna get my money's worth out of these instruments!

A few weeks ago, I published a series of blogs here that talked about the major chord shapes andl ma moving them up the neck of the ukulele. Well, since then, I've done more to figure out how you can play almost every single major, minor, 7th, and minor 7th chord shape up the neck of the ukulele. 

Intrigued?

Stick around, because I'll be talking more tomorrow about the major chord shapes up the neck of the ukulele, and then I'll dive into some minor chord shapes at the end of the week. Let's rock these ukuleles!