Tag Archives: ukulele chord melody

UD#107 The Great Race to the Melody Note

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UD#107 The Great Race to the Melodyfrom Ukulele in the Dark with Guido Heistek When we play chord melody style, we play both the chords and melody of a song at the same time. We often use a simple thumb strum through the chord that finishes on the melody note. One of the challenges of this is getting the timing right between the chord notes and the melody note. That’s something that I would like to focus on in today’s lesson! For that purpose, I’ve written a short ukulele piece.  Here is a recording of the song we will look   …Continue Reading


UD#92 White Christmas Chord Melody

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UD#92 White Christmas Chord Melodyfrom Ukulele in the Dark with Guido Heistek Today’s lesson is about chord melody, which is the subtle art of playing chords and melody at the same time. It is a solo technique that creates the illusion of two ukes playing together. I would like to talk about an aspect of chord melody that many of my students find elusive. Here is the basic concept: “Whenever possible, the chords in a chord melody arrangement are meant to be sustained for their full duration.” In essence, what this means is that chord melody arrangements sound better if   …Continue Reading


UD#69 Chord Melody: Huron Carol

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Chord Melody: Huron Carol (UD#69) from Ukulele in the Dark with Guido Heistek   Today we’ll look at a chord melody arrangement of the “Huron Carol”, which, I recently learned, is Canada’s oldest Christmas song! Here is a little video of me performing today’s song, live from my teaching studio in Vancouver. I do the song twice through. First, I do a finger-style version, which we will cover later in today’s lesson. The second time through the song I use a standard thumb strum, like we covered in the last lesson. Here is the video! Here’s what I propose. Why   …Continue Reading