Apparently the single most important piece of paper for ukulele players is a ukulele chord chart or ukulele chord table. Whether you’re a complete beginner or advanced beginner, you will need to look for the chord diagram, if it’s not on the song sheet and you don’t know it by heart. I have created many varieties of ukulele chord charts in jam sessions and my classes. But where is THE one I can use on my website?
The first chord chart
For complete beginners, the first chord diagram is the blank one. All open strings. Nothing is pressed. It just so happens that the four notes G, C, E, and A define the chords Am7 and C6.
The next most useful and easy to press (finger) chord is Fadd9, for the index finger is stronger and easier to use than the ring finger. With Fadd9, you can play any one-chord song that requires a major chord. It’s an exotic substitute for the F major chord.
Add C7 or C, you can play a two chord song in the key of F major.
Essential information
Is it necessary to include the fingering for the fretting hand? In other words, is it necessary to see number 1 for the index finger to press on a string on a fret? Number 2 for the middle finger? Number 3 for the ring finger? Number 4 for the pinky?
For beginners, knowing which finger to use to press is important. For more advanced players, the finger to use may change depending on the next or previous chord, frequency of switch, and speed of transition.
In my first book, the 110-page “UkuGlobal Happy Helpful Guide to the Ukulele” published in 2020, I chose the five most common types of chords in eight keys to diagram with left hand fingering. I also indicated the respective fret numbers below each chord diagram, to correspond to the fret to press.
A really useful chord table
If the 20-80 rule applies, you only need the 20% of all chords to play the 80% of all songs that you want to play.
What are these chords?
How should they be ordered and organized so that you can find them quickly?
Alphabetically?
Circle of Fifths?
Common chord progressions?
Most frequently to least frequently used?
My first ukulele table helped me look up the chords by the Circle of Fifths (vertically) and functions based on major scale degrees (horizontally). I included this one-page table in all the song books I compiled for my first ukulele club which met every Wednesday evening in Boston, Massachusetts. I also handed it out to the ukulele workshops and classes I taught.
Diatonic Chords in Circle of Fifths keys
Chords that use the notes from the same major scale are known as “diatonic chords.” In the previous table, all chords in the same row except for II7 and viiº7 are diatonic in that key. For instance, F, Gm, Gm7, …. are all diatonic chords in F major.
It’s safe to say that most of the chords used in a song are diatonic in that key. Occasionally, we will venture into secondary and tertiary dominants or parallel major and minor chords in a song. Such chords are non-diatonic chords.
Ordering the keys by Circle of Fifths is useful because of the dominant relationship. Most two-chord songs use the tonic and its dominant. The Circle of Fifths is also a useful diagram to look up the key signature, with increasing or decreasing number of sharps and flats, one at a time.
Redoing the above chord table in this manner produces a diatonic chord table which appears at the end (page 75) of the 80-page “Fun with Ukulele” Book and the “Ukulele Exercises Common Chord Progressions” Book (44-page PDF).
Inverting this table from landscape to portrait produces the following table in the Ukulele Exercises Common Chord Progression Book.
Ukulele chord diagrams by number of fingers or pressure points
What if we learn to finger chord diagrams, not by frequency of occurrence in songs, but by increasing difficulty of fingering?
It would make sense to learn the names of the easy chords before the difficult to finger ones.
The festive edition of “Fun with Uke” has only 8 songs in 22 pages, compared to 24 songs in the 80-page “Fun with Uke” original edition.
Are these really “number of fingers” or “pressure points” ?
A barre chord can be fingered with just one finger though up to four strings have to be pressed down somewhere on the fretboard.
Existing chord charts
Most ukulele chord tables we find are TOO comprehensive, with chord diagrams we will never use. Besides,the chord diagrams are TINY, crammed onto one page.
I have produced MANY one-page chord sheets which are included in my books (Fun with Ukulele, Fun with Uke, Ukulele Exercises, etc) and given to my students in classes and workshops. I try to make these chord diagrams as big and clear as possible.
One of these assignments is to put the dots on the correct locations in a blank chord diagram.
Another is to write the fret numbers below a chord diagram.
Finally, draw the dots and give the fret numbers for a given chord name.
Harder still is to name the chord based on a given chord diagram or set of four fret numbers.
If you are a kinesthetic learner like me, you learn the most by doing. I invite you to make your own ukulele chord table. Below is the blank chord table in the 80-page Fun with Uke Book.
How do you look up chords?
If you don’t have a single piece of paper that shows the chords, how do you look up ukulele chords?
