In the win­ter I made a short video teaser for Jesse’s upcom­ing album by get­ting him to per­form a song off it called Make Hymn Cry. As the only ukulele piece on a rap album, it def­i­nitely stands out.

Then it dawned on me this morn­ing to see if I could cover it. As I was try­ing to fig­ure out the chord pro­gres­sion, I real­ized it’s a fairly sim­ple song that only alter­nates between the G and C chords. The strum­ming in Jesse’s video is slightly sim­pler than on the album, the lat­ter of which is the pat­tern I use in my ver­sion, and includes the pick­ing arpeg­gio for the sec­ond verse.

Still, it took me half the day just to get com­fort­able with the strum­ming pat­tern because it’s syn­co­pated in a way I’m not used to yet, the rhythm at the end of each bar divided beyond eighth notes into six­teenth notes. This is what long week­ends are for.

The main thing I’m con­cen­trat­ing on is count­ing the beats so I can strum off them and keep track of where the extra strum is at the end of each bar. The next is try­ing not to speed up, which is a very bad habit of mine, regard­less of instru­ment. I also need to pay atten­tion to softly rest­ing my hand on the strings when tran­si­tion­ing to the sec­ond verse; firstly, to pre­vent the last chord from ring­ing too long, and sec­ondly, to phys­i­cally feel where the strings are so I can get my thumb on the C string. I’m def­i­nitely not good enough to know where it is at all times. Most of the rest came by itself (i.e. I’m not con­sciously focus­ing on it), prob­a­bly from already lis­ten­ing a few times to a pre-release copy of the album Jesse gave me.

The phrases of the lyrics are also syn­co­pated against the strum­ming; it always feels like your strum­ming is late because the first word of every line falls on the beat before each down-strum), which adds another layer of com­plex­ity. The fact that I made it through with­out any major mis­takes but fucked it up right at the very end¹ is why I can’t stop laughing.

My singing is strained cause I’m try­ing to project above the strum­ming to stay in bal­ance, but it’s clearly out of my com­fort zone. I’m not good enough to strum softly with con­trol yet, so I cheated and just raised my voice. The thing is, I never prac­tice singing when I’m prac­tic­ing my play­ing, usu­ally because I need to con­cen­trate on one thing at a time. Singing prac­tice is also bor­ing by itself, so I never do it, even though I should.

Anyway, I had a good day after learn­ing this lit­tle piece, and being able to fig­ure out the chords and the strum­ming was prob­a­bly just as fun as being able to play it.

1. I lost track of the extra strum in the sec­ond last bar! [↑]