Lesson #13: My Spaghetti Monster is available in Book 1.
This is it! It's time to become a fingerstyle chord-melody TuffUke player. This is the greatest song ever written and I cannot believe you don't know it. 😉 Here's the truth. We've done a lot of work on chords, and with this song, we'll barely acknowledge they're on the page, because we're going to use tablature to modify the chords as we play the melody to get a complete and sophisticated sound without being expert players, and without needing an orchestra to help us get the job done.
Years ago, I wrote the single worst novel of all time. My wife said she hated every character. In that novel, the Flying Spaghetti Monster (which is a jokey internet thing) played a plastic ukulele on account of the spaghetti sauce, and I needed to give her a theme song. I wrote this never intending to share it. Later, when I began teaching, I realized it can help you become a TuffUke player quickly and will teach you to bring to life a song you only know through the sheet music itself with a reasonably sophisticated chord palette. So Here we go.
Play the melody a zillion times until you figure it out. Make sure you're still listening to the MP3 on this site first so you know what you're getting into and then try like heck to make your version sound similar, even if it is a lot slower. Once you've done that, you will begin reading the TuffUke line and using your right-hand thumb in a downward fashion to include other strings at the same time. One of the more important things is to pay attention to your rest stroke. Your thumb should come to rest on the string you're not going to play.
This is the third of four things I ask you to memorize in this program. Here's the list:
1. The piano keyboard (so you know how notes are arranged in order).
2. Frère Jacques (so you can teach tablature to somebody else).
3. My Spaghetti Monster (so you have one song that makes you sound fancy and nobody can sing along).
4. Happy Birthday's chords (so you don't need paper to sing that song when it comes up).
