Mastering Chord Inversion for Ukulele

Book excerpt: With over 1,000 chord diagrams and 37 full-sized fingerboard charts, Mastering Ukulele Chord Inversions is the most comprehensive and useful ukulele chord book ever published. It includes all the chords you will need for fingerstyle and chord melody arrangements, complex styles like jazz and bossa nova, or simply for tickling your fingers and exercising your brain. This book can help you find any chord, but will also greatly enhance your understanding of how chords work, enabling you to become a better musician. Included are three full-sized fingerboard diagrams showing all of the practical chord intervals for major, dominant and minor chords in every key. These will help you visualize how intervals relate to each other. They will also help you play scales and arpeggios and find alternate fingerings for common chords. Rather than list all the chords of a given type in 12 keys on one page, chords are grouped together by how they are used in a particular key. If you are looking for a G7 chord, you'll find it alongside other dominant chords like G9, G7b9 and G7#5. Chords which serve similar musical roles are grouped together. Likewise, all the various flavors of major chords (6, 6/9, M7, add 2) and minor chords appear together in one convenient place. The chord diagrams have the familiar fretboard grid, with the lowest fret clearly marked. In addition, each note in the chord is labeled to aid you in your study. Each chord appears in several forms that move up the neck. The ukulele's re-entrant tuning requires either doubling or leaving out certain chord notes to accommodate the instrument's four strings. This means chord shapes are not inversions, strictly speaking, but the word is as good as any. Practicing inversions as they move up and down the neck is essential to mastering your ukulele. Alternate fingerings for chords at the lowest position of the neck have also been added.