Customer Reviews

Mel Bay Baritone Uke Chords

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This book provides large-format chord diagrams showing finger placement for all the chords a beginning or intermediate baritone uke player is likely to use. There are also photos of finger placement for major, minor, seventh, diminished, augmented and ninth chords. Chords are not presented in music notation as shown on the front cover for one chord. Inside the book, you are referred to Mel Bay Fun With the Baritone Uke or Mel Bay Fun With The Baritone Uke Book/CD Set for additional (very basic) information on strumming a few tunes on the baritone ukulele. All of these books could also be used with a tenor banjo or plectrum banjo tuned in "Chicago" or "guitar" tuning.

Some people will find the little book on this page to be useful along with Mel Bay Guitar Chords. The basic introductory information in the DVD accompanying the guitar chord book (i.e., holding and tuning a guitar) are applicable to the baritone ukulele, and many of the finger placements for playing chords are the same. If you quickly compare the chords in the two books you will get good idea of the similarities and differences in playing the two instruments. This would be especially useful if you already play the guitar a little or if a guitar player is teaching a beginner on the baritone uke or tenor banjo. Where the chords are different, the baritone uke chord could also be used as a simplified chord on the guitar. This might be nice for beginning guitar players where the complete guitar chord is tough to play. The guitar book DVD sometimes presents these simplified chords as alternatives where guitar chords using five or six strings are presented in the book.

The chords are presented in the same order in both books until the sixth chords, which are reversed in the uke book with the seventh augmented and diminished fifth chords in the guitar book. The movable and modern rhythm chords in the guitar book are replaced by a less extensive summary of movable major, minor and seventh chords on the baritone uke. These could be used as simplified movable chords on a guitar.

The baritone uke is really easy to learn for anyone that aleady plays guitar. It is just the top 4 strings of a guitar. This book does a pretty good job of showing how to play songs without those 2 missing strings. I recommend this book if you want to know the difference between guitar and baritone uke chords. The baritone uke is a great tool to write simple songs with.

I still can't play well, but it's not the books's fault. The book is very good.

The Mel Bay chord book entitled, "Mel Bay's Baritone Uke Chords," is very clear and well organized. The positioning of the fingers on the frets is most helpful. However, I do have one question. Must you continue using old and dated photographs of someone who has been dead for nearly fifteen years?

Look, I was really expecting a bit more from this book and was totally disappointed!. Its 32 pages of very LARGE PRINTED tabs with a LARGE PHOTO of uke fingering.
Since the FINGERING is already visible on the tabs, why would they need such a LARGE PHOTO of fingering?.. I should have known better than to buy this piece of nothing book!.
In the future, I"ll stay away from Mel Bay books!.. and, most of these tabs you can download from the internet for free!..

It is an excellent book and has all the chords you need in a simple easy to read format. However it would be nice to have a whole page dedicated to each set of chords.