How to Build a Chord on Ukulele

The named distances

Each distance has a shorthand — R, ♭3, 5 — called the degree: what the interval is, relative to the root.

The root is gold throughout. Of the rest, three do the work: the third decides major or minor, the fifth makes the chord stable, and the seventh gives it pull.

One degree is greyed out. The ♭2 is the only distance in the octave that appears in none of the twelve chord types in this book — every other one belongs to at least one of them. That is not the same as useless: it is everywhere as a passing note, and it does turn up in richer chords than these pages cover. It simply never forms part of a chord you would be asked to hold.

What that costs you, and what it buys

Two things follow, and they are the reason this page exists.

The bass note is usually not the root

On a piano or a guitar, the lowest note of a chord is normally the note the chord is named after, and a great deal of theory is built on that. On a ukulele it usually is not. Across the whole library of shapes in the tool on page 2, the lowest-sounding note is the root in only 48 of 144 — well under half.

So a ukulele chord is a colour rather than a foundation. It states which notes are in play and leaves the bottom of the sound to somebody else. In a group that is a virtue: the ukulele stays out of the way of the bass.

Inversions do not mean what they mean elsewhere

An inversion is normally defined by which note is in the bass — root position, first inversion, second inversion. If you cannot reliably choose the bass note, that definition has nothing to grip.

This is not a gap in your knowledge, and it is not something to fix by retuning. It is why ukulele players use the word inversion loosely, to mean another place on the neck to play the same chord. That is the sense used from here on, and page 39 deals with it properly.

And three notes on four strings

A second consequence, smaller but worth knowing. A major or minor chord is three notes; a strum sounds four strings. So something is always played twice. Given a free choice the note to double is the root — but the shape has to be playable, and that usually decides it first. Across the twenty-four major and minor shapes the root is doubled in eleven: a tendency, not a rule. F major doubles its third and looks no different for it.

The plain version: a ukulele chord is defined by which notes it contains, and by nothing else. Every page after this one follows from that.

More minors than majors

The minors are more generous still. There are eight of them within reach — three more than the majors, which is not the balance most instruments offer. Am costs a single finger.

Fig. 4 — Am, Dm, Em, Gm, Cm and Fm. F♯m and C♯m are open too.

Five majors and eight minors, none of them costing more than three fingers. That is a great deal of music available before anything on the next spread is needed.

Even the difficult ones

Gm7♭5 is a half-diminished chord — the sound of a hundred jazz standards, and a chord most guitarists do not meet for years. On a ukulele it is three fingers in first position. A diminished seventh is two.

Fig. 7 — Gm7♭5, G°7 and F+.

Altogether the open strings reach 62 of the 144 chords in the tool on page 2 — majors, minors, sevenths, sixths, suspensions, diminished and augmented. Not a beginner's corner of the instrument, but a genuine cross-section of it.

Play those four in a loop and you have the backbone of a great deal of popular music. The rest of this book is about the ground the open strings cannot reach — and about why the ones above work at all.

The same four, measured

The four chords on the ruler, rooted on G. The gold cell is the root; the coloured cells are the notes you are holding. Watch the third slide while the root and fifth sit still.

Two, three, four, five. One step at a time, and each step has a name. Sus2 and sus4 are the ones that miss the third altogether — suspended, neither major nor minor, which is why they sound unfinished and want to move.

Every chord type, in one table

Steps from the root. This is the whole system on one page — every chord in the tool on page 2 is one of these twelve rows, moved to one of twelve roots.

Twelve types, twelve roots — 144 chords, from one table. The next spread is about the problem that creates.

A, moved up one fret

Fig. 10 — A major, then the identical shape one fret higher. The bar across the diagram is your index finger, doing what the nut did before.

A major is 2 1 0 0. Everything moves up one fret and it becomes 3 2 1 1 — and the two strings that were open now need holding down. That is the bar.

It is smaller than its reputation

Barre chords have a fearsome name, and almost all of that reputation was earned on the guitar, where the first one you meet is F — six steel strings under one finger, at full tension. It is famously the point at which people give up.

B♭ is not that. Look at the diagram again: your index finger covers two strings, they are nylon, and the scale is short enough that the tension is a fraction of a guitar's. It is a genuinely small step.

If it does buzz, the reason is usually placement rather than strength: the bar wants to sit close behind the fret, on the bony edge of the finger rather than the soft middle. Rolling the finger slightly towards the nut fixes more buzzes than squeezing ever will.

The four-string bars — B♭m, Bm, and the majors around D♭ and E♭ — ask a bit more, and they can wait. B♭ is the one you need, and it is the easy one.

Finding the root

If the root is always the first string at the bar, then naming the chord is nothing more than naming one note. Bar the third fret; whatever the first string sounds there is what you are playing.

Fig. 12 — the first string, named fret by fret. Open it is A; at the twelfth fret it is A again, an octave up.

This is the only part of the fretboard this book asks you to learn, and it is one string. A guitarist has to do it twice, once for the sixth string and once for the fifth, because the guitar needs two forms to cover the chord types.

Where every note lives across the whole neck is a different subject with its own tool. Here you need one string and twelve frets of it.

Major

Fig. 13 — B♭ major — 3 2 1 1. The bar across the diagram is the first fret.

Two fingers above the bar. The root is under your bar on the first string, the third and fifth sit above it, and nothing about that changes as you move up the neck.

Sus4

Fig. 15 — B♭sus4 — the third replaced from above.

Take the third out and put the fourth in its place. Neither major nor minor, so it sounds unfinished and wants to resolve — usually back to the major, one finger away.

Major 7

Fig. 17 — B♭maj7 — one step up from the dominant seventh.

Raise that seventh by a single fret and the pull vanishes. Soft, still, unhurried. One fret separates the two most differently-flavoured chords in the book.

Augmented

Fig. 19 — B♭ augmented — the fifth pushed upwards.

The odd one out, and you can see it in the diagram: it is the only chord in the form with no bar in it — every string is stopped separately. Sharpen the fifth and the chord strains outwards; and because its intervals are all equal, one shape serves three different roots.

The second form

Here are those five, at B♭ — the same root you have been working at for the last seven pages.

They look like open chords, and at this root they are. That is the one thing that makes this form different: the root sits a fret above the bar rather than under it. At B♭ the bar is the nut, so there is nothing to hold.

Move them the way you move anything else — put the bar in behind the shape.

Fig. 20 — B♭°7, then the identical shape with the bar at the first fret. Because the root is above the bar, that is B°7 — a fret further on than the first form would have given you.

Seven chord types on the first form, five on the second, and between them there is nothing on this instrument you cannot build. That is exactly what a guitarist does with the E and A shapes — one form is never enough, on any fretted instrument.

The diminished seventh is worth one last look. Its four notes are evenly spaced, so moving it up three frets lands on the same four notes again — which means that one grip is B♭°7, D♭°7, E°7 and G°7 at once. Four roots for the price of one shape.

Table 3 on page 14 has all twelve formulas whenever you need them.

Why you would bother

Two reasons, and neither is theory.

Your hand has less to do

If a song runs C – F – G and you play all three in open position, your hand jumps around the neck. Find versions that sit near each other and it barely moves. That is the practical craft of playing chords well, and it matters far more than knowing what the chords are called.

The notes stop leaping about

When two chords in a row share a voicing region, the individual notes move a step or two rather than a great distance. The change sounds smooth instead of abrupt — the same instinct a choir uses, arrived at by fingers rather than by rule.

The tool on page 2 shows one voicing for each chord. Play the same song through two different sets and the difference is immediately obvious.

And if a chart says C/E or first inversion — play a C. On this instrument that instruction is usually advice for a bass player, not for you.

Common questions

Everything in this book is one tool and one table: the ruler on page 3, and Table 3 on page 14. The rest is where you put your fingers.