There are no shortage of ukulele chord charts around, but there aren’t that many that also show you what fingers you should be using when you are fretting these chords. But this one from Kiwi Ukulele does:
Indispensible Chord Chart(PDF)
It’s a very well laid out chord chart and even though it isn’t exhaustive, it does have pretty much every first position chord you’ll want. And the layout of it, going from chords you’ll use all the time to chords you hardly ever see, is a much better way of doing it than the standard way of grouping all the A based chords, then the B chords etc.
Tenor ukulele tabs and chords are, for the most part, exactly the same as soprano ukulele chords and tabs. Both are usually tuned GCEA with the G string being re-entrant (i.e. higher than the C string). That means you can take chords and tabs written for soprano or concert ukulele and play them on the tenor ukulele without any need to adapt them at all.
You might have noticed I used words like ‘for the most part’ and ‘usually’ rather a lot in the last paragraph. That’s because it’s not always that simple. It’s much more common for tenor ukuleles to have a G string which is lower than the C string (Low-G tuning). This means that soprano ukulele tabs will not necessarily work on the low-G ukulele. It will be possible to adapt it somewhat so it does work.
However, this does not apply to low-G tenor ukulele chords. What matters with the chords is the overall harmony rather than the specific notes. So chords for soprano ukulele should work on the tenor ukulele (even if it is tuned to low-G).
Photo by Paxsimius under CC Lincense.
The baritone ukulele is becoming increasingly popular thanks to acts like Patrick Wolf and Rio en Medio. It’s even being used to help you learn Einsteinian physics.
There are plenty of sites on the net offering ukulele tab, but very few of them offer tabs and chords for the baritone ukulele. One excellent site that does is Tab-U-Learn. Usefully, all it’s tabs are arranged by difficultly into grades.
As well as baritone ukulele tab and chords, there is also a selection of sheet music for tenor and soprano/concert ukulele.
As the baritone ukulele is tuned the same as the top four strings of the guitar, it’s usually easier to transfer tab for the guitar onto the baritone. Similarly with the chords. For the most part, you can just play the same chord shapes and ignore the lower two strings.
There are also a few baritone ukulele books on the market. For chord charts there’s Mel Bay’s Baritone Uke Chords. For chords for songs there’s Jimpin’ Jim’s The Bari Best. And for tabs there’s Mel Bay’s Easy Baritone Ukulele Tablature Method
There are no shortage of chord shapes for the standard C-tuned ukulele (GCEA) – if you’re looking for one of those check out the ukulele chord chart: standard tuning post. But chord diagrams for the more traditional D-tuned ukulele (ADF#B) are much harder to come by.
But, there is an extensive chord chart for D-tuning here (via this site).
The other option is to use Sheep Entertainment. D-tuning is the default setting on there. It’s not quite as straight forward to use as a traditional chord chart, but it is a lot of fun (particularly if you check out some of the links on the right hand side).
Many people want to include ukulele chord charts in their Word documents. The easiest way to do this is to install Chordette. It works like any other font, you install it and you can add chord diagrams to Microsoft Word Documents or any other word processing programme.
To make things easier, it comes with a handy doodad so you can find the chord you’re looking for (which is a nightmare without it).
Photo by jugbo under Creative Commons license.
It’s sad to say, but it is far more easy to find guitar chords online than it is to find ukulele chords. Luckily, there’s no problem whatsoever translating them to ukulele.
Chords written for the guitar will be exactly the same on the ukulele. If the guitar chord sheet tells you to play G, you just play the standard G chord shape on the ukulele. It’s as simple as that.
Make sure you have a ukulele chord dictionary on hand to check the chord shapes. You’ll want to ignore the guitar chord diagrams as the G chord shape for guitar looks different to the G chord shape on the ukulele.
