With Valentine’s Day around the corner, I couldn’t help revisiting the all-time classic “Can’t Help Falling in Love” which I had transcribed in C major for low G ukulele in an earlier blog post. It’s even better when transposed to F major for both low G and high G ukulele, alike. I presented this song at the second workshop on World Ukulele Day 2025. I showed how to take a lead sheet and play a “chord melody” arrangement from it in more than one way.
In my earlier blog post, I discussed how much I love this song in the key of C major. Kina Grannis poignantly sang it in this key, accompanied by a guitar and violin in the 2018 movie “Crazy Rich Asians.”
However, on the ukulele, it’s even more interesting to play it in F major.
When transposed to F major, the melody now sits higher on the ukulele, i.e. on the E and A strings. This makes it feasible to play chords by making one strum (block chord) with right thumb and “land” on the melody on the higher strings.
We can also fingerpick the broken chords into arpeggios, the triplets of up and down notes.
On the high G ukulele, we can make use of the high G string to play Campanella Style.
In the second of two workshops I gave in Zoom for World Ukulele Day 2025, I demonstrated the possibilities. Here is a clip from it.
Out of 18 who registered for the one-hour workshop in Zoom, 12 joined and participated. So far 7 have responded with feedback. I’ve given them a choice of thank you gift for completing the entire feedback form for this free workshop.
