The pattern shown above sounds something like this when you play it… It’s pretty clear to hear this when you listen to Iz play it, and although he’s playing low G, it works just as well on a ukulele strung with a high G. Notice that the first beat isn’t actually a strum at all though, what I’m doing is plucking the G string with my thumb at the start of each bar. The pattern I like to play is a slight variation on the good old fashioned D DU UDU and looks something like this… Ok here we go. There are a few ways to interpret the strumming pattern on this one and you can get away with just strumming DUDUDUDU throughout but we’re going to go a little bit beyond that in this lesson. Here are the chord boxes for you to get to grips with… If E minor is causing you problems then you can simply play a G chord and drop your pinkie finger onto the 4th fret of the C string. Probably the most difficult to deal with are the E minor and the E7. Seven chords will see you through the song (co-incidentally the same number as colours in a rainbow) and whilst that is a few to remember they’re really not that difficult and some of you will be very pleased to hear that there are no barre chords in the mix. Just the 290 million views to date for this one, not too bad at all. At it’s heart it’s a pretty simple song but it’s worth investing some time on really perfecting the strumming pattern to get an authentic sound.
The song is so beautifully played and sung that pretty much everyone that owns a ukulele will naturally gravitate towards it at some point.
If you’ve ever read my about page I said I wouldn’t do it on Ukulele Go but here I am showing I’m a man with absolutely no principles. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s beautiful version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow is one of the most popular ukulele songs of all time.