Reggae Ukulele Strum: 4 Basic Tips to Improve Your Playing!

Reggae Ukulele Strum

Introduction to Reggae Songs and Bob Marley

Reggae is an amusing music style. Bob Marley, a Jamaican musician, popularized the style of reggae. Although reggae sounds so easy, it might appear difficult for the newbies to play. Due to the off-beat and staccato approach, the guitar strumming might be onerous.

Reggae provides you with an uplifting feeling that every other music style can provide. It’s excellent for the summertime. Possibly you might be planning on going out this summer with your folks, and also you want to play some Bob Marley songs. The one instrument you’ve got is a ukulele.

However, you might be finding it very troublesome to play the songs due to the unusual approach utilized in his songs. So we came up with this tutorial, which is able to guide you on easy methods to play reggae strumming on a ukulele.

Before we start our tutorial, you must find the proper ukulele for you. Allow us to get to know a few details about the ukulele.

The ukulele belongs to an identical family as the guitar is known as the lute family. It’s a small guitar-like instrument with 4 strings. The strings utilized in a ukulele are nylon strings. There are five basic sorts of the ukulele.

Bob Marley live on stage

Reggae Ukulele Fundamentals

Listen to plenty of reggae. We at all times say, “In case you haven’t heard it, you can’t play it.” The extra familiar you might be with the type, the more you’ll perceive what’s happening within the music – even when you bodily can’t make the correct motions yet.

Bob Marley is the apparent name right here. He was one of the best, nonetheless is one of the best, and needs to be studied from the start to the end of his profession.

In case you aren’t familiar with Bob, purchase the Legend album and go from there. If you’re familiar with Bob, beef up your assortment with Exodus, Kaya, Survival, and as many different masterpiece albums as you may afford.

So let’s see some types of reggae ukulele strum methods that will help you out to get reggae rhythm and play some reggae songs.

Bob Marley Albums

Fundamental Skank Strum on Ukulele

Reggae is band-based music. Every instrument performs a key function and each has a really distinctive sound that’s discovered only throughout the style.

The plain instrumental part that we’ll be copycatting on the ukulele is the guitar (generally additionally performed by the keyboardist). Fortunate for us, it’s additionally the most vital to the sound. Without the rhythm skank, reggae doesn’t sound so much like reggae.

So what’s a “skank”? This is a way that short strums are called in the reggae music that makes this music recognizable and are the pillars around which this music is built. Playing offbeat is not usual for the rest of the genres, but that is not the case with styles like reggae and ska.

It may be counted two alternative ways:

1 ‘2’ 3 ‘4’ or 1 ‘and‘ 2 ‘and’ 3 ‘and’ 4 ‘and’

Which you select relies upon a lot on the music. You will be able to experiment and find the best strumming method from the skank type that will suit the song you want to play.

Reggae Ukulele Strum Skank

Squeeze and Release

With our strumming hand now doing its job, there’s really a bit of work in your fretting hand (left hand) too. When playing in a reggae feel you’ll need to make your chords very staccato in sound (generally known as a chop).

We’re aiming for a brief, sharp hit that’s rapidly muted. For this, we’re going to lean closely on barre chords (it’s possible to do that with open chords utilizing pinkie muting however we’ll save that for one for another lesson).

Barre chords give us one nice advantage – by releasing the pressure from our fretting hand we will rapidly mute the sustain after strumming the chord.

This is also a very recognizable finger process that is important in creating reggae patterns but is so easy, that even beginners will have fun learning it. So mute the string to create a nice muted sound and that’s the trick!

Reggae Scratch Strum

To carry out the Reggae Scratch strum:

  • Rest the side of your hand on the strings, right next to the bridge, along with your thumb pointing outward, away from the ukulele. Just be sure your hand is muting the strings as it rests on them.
  • Use your first finger to strum as indicated under as you proceed to mute the strings.

You will get a scratching sound.

Reggae Scratch Sound. Image courtesy from playukulelenow

Here is the way you do it:

  • Tap your foot evenly to maintain a gentle beat: 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on.
  • Now count 1, 2 and, 3, 4 and, notice you will add an “and” after the 2nd and the 4th beat.
  • Play on these beats: 1, D U, 3, D U. You can be playing a Downward strum on the “2” and an Upward strum on the “and” same factor on the “4 and”

Double Chops

Next up we’re going to check out a double chop rhythm/strumming pattern. For the reggae double chop we’re nonetheless playing off the beat however we’ve got to get a really fast down-up performed.

Once more we’re aiming for that brief, sharp hit so that you’ll need to release the pressure in your fretting hand. Ideally, you’ll do that twice – once for the down strum and once for the up strum.

Practice this because beginner players might be hard to play at the start, but this is a widely used reggae strumming pattern that will make your song sound more traditional to the reggae beat.

Reggae Double Chop

Conclusion on Reggae Ukulele Strum

Ukulele and Reggae (also Ska) go completely with one another. There is numerous interesting and difficult reggae strumming patterns out there. We learned about the ukulele and methods you will want to play any reggae songs.

Reggae strumming on the ukulele is easy if you already are familiar with the genre. Once you learn the chords, the strumming will come naturally to you. We shared several tips in this lesson on how the strum should be played.

The main tip is to understand the importance of practice. Begin practicing every day and you will create what you are after.

In case you work hard, you’ll obtain your targets. So our recommendation to you is to surf the web and attempt to study as many as reggae songs possible. Or at least try to do it till you’ve got full mastery over it.

Charles Steinhoff

Charles Steinhoff

Charles is here and I am guitar and ukulele enthusiast. Been playing these instruments for over 10 years now and I decided to share some of my knowledge and expertise with the world in terms of these stringed instruments and it's accessories.

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