Do you need to read music to play the ukulele?

A lot of people ask me this when considering taking up the ukulele. They worry that they won't be able to play it because they can't read music. So do you need to read music to play the ukulele? The short answer is no! So how do we play?

How ukulele chords work

Ukulele music is similar to guitar music, in that we use diagrams to show where your fingers should go. The diagram is called a chord box (for obvious reasons) and pictures the ukulele frets upright. So a C chord diagram would look like the diagram below.

The name of the chord is above the diagram, in this case C, meaning C major. It shows that you put a finger on the third fret of the A string. Any strings with no dots are still strummed, but no fingers go on the frets.

Some ukulele chord diagrams may show finger numbers in the dot, indicating which finger you should use. They don't always do this, which allows a bit of freedom as to which fingers you use. However, there are certain rules that should be followed when playing chords, but that's a post for another day!

The other thing about chord boxes is the names - major chords are just notated with a single letter, such as F or D. But if you have a minor chord, you use a small "m" afterwards; Am means A minor for example. This means that you know exactly what chord you are supposed to play, rather than having to look at a stack of notes and figure it out yourself!

One note at a time

So what about when we want to play one note at a time or try fingerpicking? This is where a slightly different form of music comes into play. Tablature, usually called tab for short, is a way of notating which strings are plucked, and which frets are pressed. The C chord above would be notated differently in tab but still gets the same sound. It would look something like this:

Tab looks at the strings as if the ukulele was led on its side, with the A string towards the ceiling. The numbers show which frets to press - 0 means pluck the string but press no frets, and 3 means press fret 3. It's much simpler than it sounds!

When using tab, bear in mind that numbers stacked on top of each other are all played at the same time, whereas numbers with nothing above or below are played individually. For example, in the tab below, beats 1 and 7 are played with all the strings, whereas the rest are plucked individually.

In summary: Do you need to read music to play the ukulele?

Not your standard music with 5 lines and a whole load of dots, no! The notation that we do use is easier to follow and understand. I think that this is one of the reasons that it is so easy to learn - you don't need to remember where the notes are on the stave, because the chord boxes show you exactly what's what!

Interested in learning more?

If you'd like to explore chord boxes or tabs in more detail, get in touch and we can take a look at whatever you'd like to learn! You can contact me at lloydukulele@hotmail.com or via my contact page.