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! [↩]