Ukulele Chord Changes - How to Make Them Smooth

The biggest challenge beginner ukulele players face is getting their chord changes quick and smooth. Too often players' strumming is halting whilst playing.

This article will give you a few tips on how to avoid this situation and bring together your chords to make smooth changes.

Tip 1: Play At A Slower Tempo

The biggest mistake most beginners make when learning the ukulele is trying to play too fast. Whenever you learn a new song, always start playing it at a snails pace. This will get your fingers used to making the changes.

If you're playing too fast, you will make mistakes. And the more mistakes you make, the more your fingers will repeat that same pattern and continue to make mistakes.

Tip 2: Strum Evenly

When you are strumming, make sure you strum slowly enough so that the chord changes fit between the strums and the music is smooth. At the beginning, this may mean you have to play exceptionally slowly. Don't worry about it.

Once you have it under your fingers, you can start to increase the tempo gradually. This will result in much smoother playing.

Tip 3: Prepare for the Changes

You should have in your mind and which chord comes next and how you're going to change to it. Think of ways you could make that change easier for yourself.

Take the change from a C chord to a G chord. With the C chord you'll be fretting the A string with your third finger. Whilst you're doing this, you could also be holding down the A string at the second fret with your middle finger - so it will be there already when you have to change to G.

Another preparation you can make is to have your fingers placed just above the string where they will have to be for the next chord. Now they will be much closer to where they need to be for the next chord.

Ukulele Chords - Learn To Play Easy Chord Changes

It is very fun and mostly easy to play ukulele chords. Let's take a look at some easy chord changes!

Before we delve to deeply into our ukulele chords let's take a look at the tuning of your ukulele. The resulting names of the chords we play depends on how we tune the ukulele.

In this ukulele lesson I assume that you play a soprano ukulele and that you have tuned it in C.

What does C-tuning mean?

Let's take a look at the piano keyboard to find out how to tune the ukulele.

C-tuning means that the third string on you ukulele is tuned to a C. If you use a piano when you tune your ukulele you will find these notes in the octave in the middle of the keyboard.

The notes in this most commonly used octave on the piano are called C4-B4. The number 4 indicate that the notes are on the fourth octave on an ordinary piano.

The first string on your ukulele will be tuned to an A4 as we call it. The next string will sound like the piano key E4. The third string will be the note C4. The fourth string will be the note G4.

Our first chord is C major. Let's take a look at it:

C: 0/4 0/3 0/2 3/1

What type of notation is this?

This is a type of ukulele tab notation where we use numbers to indicate which fret to press down and on which string.

3/1 for example means: Press down fret 3 on string 1.

We will now proceed with the chord G major:

G: 0/4 2/3 3/2 2/1

As you can see this chord is the same chord as a D major on a guitar. A little bit confusing if you also play guitar but I guess you will get used to it.

The chord F major looks like this on your ukulele:

F: 2/4 0/3 1/2 0/1

Now we have three chords at our disposal and we can create our first ukulele chord progression:

C / / / G / / / F / / / G / / /

What does the slashes mean?

The most basic way to interpret this notation is:

Strum once on a chord name. Continue strumming on the same chord once for every slash!

Let's add one more chord to make this progression a little bit more interesting. Here is G7:

G7: 0/4 2/3 1/2 2/1

Here is the progression:

C / / / G7 / / / F / / / G7 / / /

Before we end this ukulele lesson we will add just one more chord. Here is D minor:

Dm: 2/4 2/3 1/2 0/1

Here is the ukulele chord progression:

C / / / G7 / / / Dm / / / G7 / / /

To really learn to play chords on your ukulele it is important to play them together. The most difficult part is to change from one chord to another smoothly without slowing down the tempo.

Try practising playing two chords at a time. The actual training consists of changing between the chords.

This is a great way to rapidly learn to play the chords of any ukulele song!